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.

Forbidden Desire and Blameless Friendships

I should know better than to write about reviews of books rather than the books themselves, but I've been lazy lately, and since this review irritated me enough to start me writing, I'll go with it.  Remember, though, that I haven't yet read the book in question, and that I'm writing about the review.

So I happened on this review at the Guardian's website, of Forbidden Desire in Early Modern Europe: Male-Male Sexual Relations, 1400-1750 by Noel Malcolm, published in December by Oxford University Press.  My beef is primarily with the reviewer, Peter Conrad, who writes as if he's never read a book about gay history before.  While that's true of many people, including gay ones, I expect a little better from a reviewer in a prestigious newspaper.

Evidently the book focuses on the brutal persecution of "the sodomites, as Malcolm grimly insists on calling them," and Conrad says it's all the fault of Christianity as he grimly but pruriently insists on detailing the punishments that our fore-uncles suffered.  "As Malcolm demonstrates, this paranoid bigotry derived from a misreading of scripture. The ungodly city of Sodom is condemned because its inhabitants committed a particularly abominable sin, but the Bible does not specify that this peccadillo was 'male-male sexual intercourse or desire."  Conrad here echoes gay Christian apologetics of the 1960s through the 1990s or so, which argued that the story of Sodom was not about male-to-male buttsex but about violations of hospitality.  This line reached its peak in John Boswell's influential Christianity, Social Tolerance, and Homosexuality (Chicago, 1980), which strained mightily to prove that Christianity was not hostile to homosexuality at all.  Boswell was effectively rebutted by numerous gay scholars, but his work remains popular (if largely unread) by gay laymen.  I'll just note that Conrad overlooks the prohibitions of male-to-male sex in Leviticus (18:22 and 20:13), which commands the execution of both partners, and in Romans 1, without referring to Sodom.  He also overlooks the hostility to receptive partners in Greek and Roman antiquity, expressed in heated rhetoric that presaged the ranting of medieval theologians on the subject.  That hostility is often found among gay men today.  While male-to-male sex was clearly common and popular in Roman society, an equally popular way to discredit one's political or other enemies was to accuse them of enjoying sexual passivity.  This let the accuser wallow in elaborate exciting fantasies about other people's practices, as bigots have done ever since.

The persecutions of sodomites weren't as consistent as Conrad implies either.  That doesn't excuse them, but it does indicate that religion wasn't the only or determining factor.  In Florence, for example, moral panics came and went.  According to Michael Rocke's Forbidden Friendships: Homosexuality and Male Culture in Renaissance Florence (Oxford, 1996), authorities realized that draconic punishments made it harder to get convictions, so they changed the penalties to fines. "Sex here seems to be followed, almost automatically, by excruciating death," Conrad writes; well, sometimes, but not always or "automatically."  If the Florentine sex cops were driven by religious fervor, they should have maintained the beheadings and torture.  Conrad even acknowledges this: "The moral panic whipped up by these prosecutions often concealed squalid financial or political motives. A French assault on the secretive Knights Templar in the 14th century used sodomy as an excuse for confiscating their wealth."

Conrad may not be aware of it, but gay scholars have been investigating these matters since at least the 1970s.  In addition to Rocke, I think of a paper in The Gay Academic (ed. Louie Crew, Etc. Publications, 1978, pp. 73-78) on a sodomite hunt in the Netherlands that led to the execution of at least fifty-nine men, plus the harassment and expulsion of many more, in 1730.  Jonathan Ned Katz' Gay American History (Crowell, 1976) has a long documentary section on official violence against gay people. Louis Crompton's Byron and Greek Love (California, 1985) details the public torture and executions of English sodomites in the late 1700s. And so on: these are just off the top of my head.  I imagine Noel Malcolm is aware of his predecessors, even if Peter Conrad isn't.

I look forward to reading Forbidden Desire in Early Modern Europe, possibly this year; the Kindle edition is reasonably priced, so I intend to buy it soon.  But I found this bit, the end of Conrad's review, off-putting: "Announcing that he has 'come to this subject with no personal investment in it', Malcolm resists the wishful thinking of historians who double as gay activists and back-project 'anachronistic sexual significances' on to blameless friendships between medieval men."  For a moment it was as if I were reading about a publication from the 1970s or earlier, with the author distancing himself from his subject (he's not that way, he's impartial and objective!), as if anyone cared anymore.  Even worse is that bit about "anachronistic sexual significances" and "blameless friendships."  I've written about that before.  Erotic love relations between men are also blameless, and there's nothing anachronistic about wondering if same-sex friends were also erotic partners. The ancient Greeks, for example, were sure that the Iliad's Achilles and Patroclus were erastes and eromenos - though they couldn't agree on which was which.  If anything, gay scholars like Alan Bray and David M. Halperin have done the opposite of what Malcolm says, denying erotic elements in medieval friendships.  So I'll have to see Malcolm's remarks in their context.

Beat Me, Torture Me, Make Me Become a Nurse

One downside to living in a small town -- this one, anyway -- is that Christian religiosity is turned up to 11.  Though it's a small paper, copy must be hard to find, so the local newspaper fills out its columns with devotional writing, prose and verse, by local writers.  This becomes a bit hard to take after awhile, but I'm a big boy and I don't mind diversity - I just wish for more of it.

Another irritant is the convention of beginning obituaries with the claim that the deceased went to Heaven to be with his or her Heavenly Father.  It's a convention, not to be taken seriously of course.  I know some of these people, and I wouldn't be so sure of their posthumous destination, very much the opposite -- but then, what do I know?  Racism and general hatefulness may be qualifications for Heaven.  I'm afraid I upset one young librarian recently when, checking out a book after a surfeit of obituaries, I remarked on this trope and said that when I go, I want my obituary to begin by kvelling that on such and such a day, I descended into the welcoming fires of Hell to be with my Lord and Master Satan for eternity.  I'm not really going to require such a thing, because I don't believe in Hell any more than I believe in Heaven, and since I won't be around to observe people's reactions, it would be a pointless gesture.  But I'd settle for something like this (via).

If people are comforted by these fantasies, it's not for me to pick on them I suppose, and for that reason I feel bad about upsetting the young librarian.  (For all I know, though, she's a hateful Trumpian in her personal life - it's all too likely anywhere in Indiana -- and if so, I'd happily upset her more, but not while she's on duty.)

NPR's Morning Edition has been worse than usual this week, with some fatuous academics distorting history and generally dishonoring their professions.  On Fridays there's always a segment from Story Corps, the oral history organization, and they're usually inoffensive enough.  Today's featured a man who, as a 7-year-old boy, was hit by a van while riding his bike.  He spent some time in a hospital in an induced coma, but eventually recovered and is now a chef.  Most of the conversation was between his mother and one of the EMTs who brought him to the hospital.  They formed a bond and became friends for several years, then lost touch.  They met again when the EMT heard a familiar voice at a nurse's station, and lo! it was the boy's mother, who'd become a nurse.

The mother reflected:

It's interesting because when I was a little girl, my dad used to tell me, you're going to be a nurse. But when this accident happened, I said, maybe this is God's way of saying, you know, your father was right. I enrolled in nursing school ....

At that point, I exclaimed "You people are sick!"  So God sent that van to nearly kill her little boy in order to "tell" her she should be a nurse?  The amorality of popular religion, the kind of theology ordinary laypeople invent (often to the horror of clergy and academic theologians) always appalls me, and this bit was a sort of booster shot.  It's harmless enough, compared to much faith, but I'm amazed that this woman could calmly say something so heartless with a straight face.  And not about distant strangers, but about an event that directly affected her and her son.

This brings to mind what someone said, that they'd prefer a universe without gods to one with a god who sits above, watching people suffering, and does nothing about it.  This feels obviously right to me; but I especially find no comfort in a god who causes suffering to achieve some obscure and uncertain aim.  Yet many (most?) people do find comfort in that belief, and are horrified at the idea that no Supreme Being is out there, and things just happen.  This can't be something that evil priests forced on them; if there were no priests or churches, they'd invent it on their own.

Hope You'll Read All the Way to the End

Right after I finished the last post, the author of this article linked to her article on Twitter, urging us "to read all the way to the end."  I did, expecting something interesting to appear; it didn't.

The article describes a new church, combined with a coffeehouse, that is going to open in an existing building in Durham, North Carolina.  It attracted attention from liberal Christians in the area because it's affiliated with a "non-LGBTQ+ affirming" organization "that helps fund and plant churches."  Questions directed to the founder/pastor were met with the standard warm-fuzzies evasiveness that's standard in antigay churches these days. The pastor, Sherei [sic] Lopez Jackson, offered to meet virtually with the objectors, but blocked some of them on social media, and then conveniently got into an auto accident before the meeting could take place.  Could God have been trying to tell her something?

Lopez Jackson told her critics that "I, personally, hold an interpretation of scripture that Christian marriage is a sacred covenant between one man and one woman and believe that sexual intimacy has the potential to be at its healthiest in that context."  It's noteworthy, then, that she ignores the Christian scriptural prohibition of women clergy, and has complained about the "sexist pushback she had received from people who did not believe women should have church leadership positions." According to the article, the organization supporting the implantation of her church, Association of Related Churches, also opposes the ordination of women.

I wasn't at all surprised to learn that "Numerous churches in Durham also do not doctrinally affirm LGBTQ+ rights, including the [United Methodist Church] denomination that is planting the church. Still, a conservative church in such a prominent location has caused waves."  The "waves" included "a pair of women [who] were seen pouring a thick perimeter of salt around the church storefront—a rite traditionally performed to cleanse a space of negative spiritual energy. The salt lingered for several days afterward."  Countering superstition with superstition is amusing, but I wonder what the reaction would be if some antigay Christians had performed an analogous rite outside an LGBTQ+-affirming church.  No, I don't wonder: I'm sure it would be a holy freakout.

As I've said before, I don't understand why liberals who oppose bigotry always seem to be taken by surprise when they encounter even its mildest manifestations, and are unable to imagine constructive countermeasures.  The article goes on to quote Krista Nordgren, a lesbian and a co-founder of The Mothership, an arts space in the neighborhood that was "shuttered" in 2020 during the COVID pandemic.

“I’m opposed to homophobia wherever it lives, but I’m especially concerned about the presence of Pioneers in this particular neighborhood because safe spaces are so rare and important to queer people,” Nordgren, who ran The Mothership space alongside Katie DeConto and Megan Bowser, said over the phone. “This neighborhood has traditionally been so welcoming. Because of the community-facing business aspect, I fear that people will unwittingly stumble into Pioneers, not knowing that it’s not a place where they’re celebrated or embraced.”...

“My expression of love is the most dignified part of my life, and you can’t understand my humanity, let alone respect it, if you feel like my love is undeserving or outside of your paradigm of godliness and health,” Nordgren says. “It’s a surprise that one year, there’s a place that is so affirming it can actively draw out this really tender part of me that was kept hidden and let me step into this really beautiful new life—and then a year later and like 10 feet away, there’s a place that is purposefully opposed to me living that life.”

I suppose I sympathize with Nordgren, but not too much.  We live in a pluralistic and diverse society, and once again I can't credit her (no doubt theatrical) "surprise" that there are still antigay churches in Durham and that one is moving into this neighborhood of Durham.  Whining is protected speech, and she's entitled to dislike antigay Christianity and to speak against it, but not to be surprised by it. There's a familiar authoritarianism lurking behind her words: there should not be any place in Durham where her loving is not respected.  The antigay churches would agree, only in reverse.  The same goes for her fear that "people will unwittingly stumble into Pioneers, not knowing that it's not a place where they're celebrated or embraced."  It's the mirror image of antigay bigots throwing tantrums about seemingly "innocent" pastimes like face-painting at Pride celebrations, or Drag Queen Story Hour -- little children will think that being gay is innocent and normal and fun, and next thing you know they'll be recruited to the gay lifestyle!

As a much older gay man who came out in 1971, I've long been baffled by the way that some gay people vacillate between cowering in fear because they live in a homophobic society and being shocked! shocked! that there's still homophobia out there, even among people they know.  The Culture of Therapy mindset, which is heavily authoritarian, responds by insisting that we must be protected by certified professionals, our hands held, wherever we go, because we couldn't possibly learn to defend ourselves.  It's quite hostile to the idea that gay people or any other minority might not need those professionals to shield them all our lives.  We must not learn how to deal with outsiders on our own.  All of this reminds me of the corresponding attitudes I've noted against reactionary evangelicals, whose faith is evidently so weak that any interaction with non-evangelicals (let alone gay ones) terrifies them, so they avoid it as much as possible.

A lot of people I've known, both gay and straight, have assumed that being openly gay is born of a wish to live in a hermetically sealed gay-only world.  No, that is the closet.  For me and for other openly gay people I've known, it means the exact opposite: I move among straights and gays as myself, without wearing the mask or living a double life.  It has allowed me, or should I say us, to confront and challenge antigay bigotry -- any kind of bigotry, in fact -- when we encounter it, instead of fussing at it from a distance.  I should add that I began doing this almost at once, when I was still isolated from any gay community.  Maybe Krista Nordgren isn't ready for that yet, hasn't been out long enough, and all the social changes that have happened in the past half-century have not made her feel less alone; so be it.

What would I propose as a way of dealing with Pioneers?  It's apparently going to be a space for arts and crafts vendors as well as a coffeehouse and a church.  (I was surprised by Pioneers's pastor saying "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."  I don't spend a lot of time in churches, but from what I've observed, most them make some effort to use their "real estate" during the rest of the week: for Bible study, fellowship groups, and services on other days than Sunday, among other things.  Lopez Jackson, for a Christian working towards the ministry, seems about as ignorant about practical religion as many atheists.)  One could visit, look at the vendors' wares, talk to people, all without spending any money there.  Some of the vendors might well be unaware of Lopez Jackson's theology, given everyone's assumptions about the neighborhood.  Certainly word of mouth and education should be used to inform stray passersby about the church's position.  All this could be done without getting self-righteous or confrontational, though of course there are circumstances where confrontation is appropriate.  But that should come after other less glamorous approaches are used.

Frankly, I don't see that Pioneers is likely to have a great future.  From the article it appears that the church will be "planted," and that Lopez Jackson and her already-ordained husband haven't bothered to do the hard work on the ground of building a congregation to use the space on Sundays.  Do they have any pastoral experience?  Lopez Jackson is good at evading hard questions; what will she do at the pulpit?  She seems lukewarm to me. They've done some market research, and see a niche. They've gotten monetary support from their relatives and a boost from the landlord, who's kept the space vacant for a long time for unknown reasons. This doesn't look to me like a recipe for success, either for a church or for a business.

I'm Not a Heretic, You're a Heretic!

I hate unsourced memes, so I looked around to see if Hedges actually said this; he did, so that's settled.

"Heresy" is a meaningless buzzword; it only conveys that the person who uses it dislikes the teachings of the group he's attacking.  It comes from the Greek haeresis, which seems originally to have meant "choice" but came to refer to philosophical schools and religious subdivisions.  

The Greek word was used by Church writers in reference to various sects, schools, etc. in the New Testament: the Sadducees, the Pharisees, and even the Christians, as sects of Judaism. Hence the meaning "unorthodox religious sect or doctrine" in the Latin word as used by Christian writers in Late Latin. But in English bibles it usually is translated 'sect.'

Like other neutral words, "sect" and "heresy" became pejoratives, as with Hedges here.  The philosopher Walter Kaufmann tried to reclaim the term in his 1961 book The Faith of a Heretic, but though I understood what he was trying to do I never found his redefinition persuasive or useful.  The thing to remember is that "heretics" almost always consider themselves to be truly orthodox, and their critics to be the true heretics.  Christianity itself originated as a sect of Judaism, and the early Christians quickly claimed to be true Judaism, even after their sect became almost exclusively made up of gentiles. This is the sort of thing Hedges should have learned during his three years at Harvard Divinity School, which was originally founded by Puritan heretics (who'd broken with the Anglican heresy) four centuries ago. Evidently he didn't, and apart from self-righteousness I wonder what he did learn there.

This is a minor criticism.  The major one is that Harvard is an elite school whose function is to train imperialists and captains of industry.  The "worst aspects of American imperialism, capitalism, chauvinism, violence and bigotry" were "acculturated into the Christian religion" long before fundamentalism become a potent political force in the United States, and Harvard-schooled divines were part of that process.  Hedges must know that American Christianity has always been used to justify expansion and imperialism, from the Pilgrim fathers onward.  Before the English arrived in the Western hemisphere, Spanish and other European imperialists claimed it with the blessing of Roman Catholicism.  And before that, Christian imperialism spread by the sword throughout Europe and parts of Asia and Africa.  What you might call Christian spiritual imperialism, the conviction that all nations belonged to Christ, also played a role: once the sect achieved political power, it was hardly surprising that it would "acculturate" state violence according to the flesh into orthodoxy as well.

None of this should be news to Chris Hedges; in another context he'd probably bring up these little matters himself.  But he's on a roll, he's pandering to his audience (note the reactions in the transcript), and no doubt he was full of the Holy Spirit.  (The presenter, Robert Scheer, suggests that Hedges is a "prophetic voice."  It might be true -- prophets aren't known for their coherence or rationality.)  Demonizing your opponents is fine when you're the good guy.

To his credit, Hedges attacked the Christian president Barack Obama many times, even though Obama is not a fundamentalist in Hedges's terms.  Many anti-fundamentalists fawned on Obama, and they'd probably agree with Hedges that fundamentalists are heretics.  But you don't need to be a Christian to attack a bad president, and given Christianity's hopelessly mixed record on most issues, it's really irrelevant.  Hedges' popularity in certain circles, I think, comes from his tell-it-like-it-is, that's-how-I-roll rhetoric, which like most such rhetoric has only a tenuous connection to facts.  What matters to most people isn't factual accuracy but that let's-you-and-him-fight adrenaline rush.

Love Me, Love My Culture

American discourse on "race," "ethnicity," and "culture" stinks to high heaven, because it's rooted in concepts that are antiquated to begin with, and flat wrong beyond that.  (Things are no better in other countries, but I'm talking about us.)  I sympathize, since I'm trying to make sense of these issues too, but I recognize that the categories are incoherent at best.  I'm not sure they can be fixed.

On Thursday morning NPR posted this story, about racial divisions among churches around Washington DC.  They interviewed the pastor of a church that's trying to work toward a more "multicultural" approach.  What seems to be the problem isn't so much overt racism as cultural differences between white and black churches, and the expectations of the worshipers from each.  As I listened to him, I began to suspect that the problem might not be a problem after all, and that racism is not going to be eliminated by erasing cultural differences.

The pastor makes some remarkable admissions here, perhaps unawares.  That worship is not a pure, timeless and ahistorical expression of service to deity but a human construction shaped by culture and habit.  That culture is not something "natural," fallen from heaven, but the product of human choices.  If white churches should modify their liturgy and other practices to make them more "multicultural," then why shouldn't black churches do so as well?  Of course, black churches are already heavily shaped by white culture: the services are performed in English using a religion that channeled Jewish and other west Asian sources through centuries of European culture, appropriate dress is European, church buildings are European, the musical instruments are European.  The Pentecostal elements, in those churches, aren't African either.  But I don't know, maybe African-American Christians have already compromised enough?  One could make the case, except that they seem not to be aware of it. African-American culture generally is also largely assimilated.  It's not very persuasive to invoke cultural survival of a culture that is already 'impure.'  But all cultures are.  Whether he knows it or not, this guy is moving toward atheism: I'm rooting for him.

The same applies to the white churches, of course: their Christianity is already a patchwork stitched together from many disparate sources.  You know, all those "pagan" elements that have found their way into Christian celebrations - "Christmas" trees, Yule logs, Easter eggs, and so on?  But also: Christianity originated in Palestinian Judaism, but the versions we know now came through Gentile ("Greek," as the New Testament writers call it) churches, with considerable conflict between Jewish and non-Jewish Christians (it all hangs out in Paul's letter to Galatians), and then through Rome (a catch-all for the multicultural Empire) and Western Europe.  The Eastern churches, lumped together as Orthodoxy, reflect other cultural differences.  More differences are emerging as Christianity spreads through Africa and Asia, and as Evangelical Protestantism competes successfully with Catholicism in Latin America.  Would people from these churches feel at home in a majority-white, middle- to upper-class D.C. service?

In all these cases, social construction relies on a heritage of forgetting that what feels comfortable, natural, neutral, is the current state of many centuries of change and learning.  Just within a given stream of tradition, whether the church be white or black, there are details that will trip up a visitor from one denomination to another.  A white Episcopalian who visits a white Presbyterian church will find many things about the service that feel 'wrong,' and indeed people have died over such things, though from a larger perspective they're of no more moment than how to hang a roll of toilet paper (over? under?).  Where does the burden of adaptation lie: on the visitor, or on the host?

I don't think white churches should have to assimilate any more than non-white churches should.  If a congregation wants to develop liturgies and worship practices that will work for an ethnic rainbow, that is their choice, but it's likely that they'll end up with everyone feeling dissatisfied, at least until they adjust to the changes.  What we need is not the erasure and elimination of differences, but respect for differences, and that inevitably means judgment about which differences matter and which don't.

A Great Hill to Die On

Now for unChristian's chapter on Homosexuality.

This passage encapsulates Kinnaman and Lyons's approach, not just to homosexuality but to Christian/"outsider" interaction and perception in general.

In our research, the perception that Christians are “against” gays and lesbians—not only objecting to their lifestyles but also harboring irrational fear and unmerited scorn toward them—has reached critical mass. The gay issue has become the “big one,” the negative image most likely to be intertwined with Christianity’s reputation. It is also the dimension that most clearly demonstrates the unChristian faith to young people today, surfacing a spate of negative perceptions: judgmental, bigoted, sheltered, right-wingers, hypocritical, insincere, and uncaring. Outsiders say our hostility toward gays—not just opposition to homosexual politics and behaviors but disdain for gay individuals—has become virtually synonymous with the Christian faith.

Let me begin by assuring the reader that unlike more extreme atheists, I do not hate Christians; I object to their lifestyles but do not harbor irrational fear and unmerited scorn toward them.  I know and love many Christians, some of whom I assume are good people.  I don't disdain them, I only oppose Christian politics and behaviors, and would like to help them, if I can.  That includes David Kinnaman and Gabe Lyons, whose painful struggle with Christianity is evident on every page of unChristian.  David and Gabe, it's not you, it's your lifestyle.  You can change.

Of course I don't believe that Kinnaman and Lyons would feel warmed by my welcoming words, though I mean them sincerely.  I imagine they'd feel patronized, and recognize that my insistence on my love and concern for them is only meant to distract attention from my principled rejection of Christianity.  My acceptance of them doesn't mean I accept their faith.  In the same way, it's not their surface conduct toward gay people that I, and I presume the young Christians and ex-Christians they surveyed, reject: it's their teachings about homosexuality.  (And about many other issues as well, but they're not my subject here.)

I'm not surprised that many of the young Christians Kinnaman interviewed put their objections to conservative evangelical Christianity in terms of hate and hostility, or in terms of opposition to gays and lesbians.  As Kinnaman admits, hatred and hostility have been hard to miss in Christian antigay campaigns.

Here is an example: one seventeen-year-old churchgoer described her experience bringing a gay friend to church. “The youth pastor knew I was going to bring him, and even though his talk really had nothing to do with homosexuality, he still found a way to insert ‘God created Adam and Eve not Adam and Steve’ into his comments. I was sitting there, just dying. This happened more than once. My friend was at a point where he was interested in seeing what Jesus might offer, and the door was just slammed shut” [102].

It will be an uphill struggle for Christians like Kinnaman who profess goodwill toward us to convince us that they really do mean well.  I suggest that merely professing their good intentions and biting back the "Adam and Steve" jokes is not going to be enough; at the very least they're going to have to put more pressure on their leaders and peers to change their attitudes.  Lots of luck with that.

People do have a tendency to confuse opposition to someone's actions with opposition to the person him or herself, which presumably is why so many people told Kinnaman that Christians are "against" gay men and lesbians.  Kinnaman himself slips up on page 103: "Because of our opposition to homosexuals, outsiders cannot picture the church as the loving community of believers Jesus envisioned."  Much if not most of the time, the distinction is made dishonestly, because in practice the distinction doesn't matter.  I suppose there are a few heterosexual "unChristians" with LGBT friends or relatives who'd be reassured by Kinnaman's moderate tone, for a while at least, in some cases long enough to drift back into the churches they'd previously rejected.  I doubt that many gay people or many straight friends and relatives will fall for it.

It's difficult to figure out exactly what Kinnaman and Lyons think the place of LGBT people in their church should be.  For one thing, they and the commentators to whom they give space in unChristian tend to focus less on us than on themselves.  For example, the writer Sarah Raymond Cunningham, who informs us that "I have braved a few real-life conversations with homosexual friends" (113):

There were dozens of tangible traits I cherished about my friend, and I told him so. But—in a voice trembling with nervousness and compassion—I confessed I was afraid my friendship might seem insincere if I couldn’t affirm what he held to be a central part of his identity: his sexuality.

“As far as I can tell,” I gulped, “the Bible only introduces one kind of sexual union, and that is between a man and a woman. So, I have to believe this is the course that leads to the fullest life—the life the Creator intended for us.”

When I spit out these defining sentences, I worried all my friend could hear was Blah-Blah-Christian-Blah-Blah.  But he stared back at me kindly, so I continued...

I think the conversation changed me more than my friend, because it forced me to acknowledge parts of God’s will I sometimes overlooked. To accept that God doesn’t want me to do things even he does not choose to do—to control or hijack someone else’s freedom [113, 114].

It's as if what matters most is her, not her friend.  Given that "he stared back at me kindly," it sounds as if he was counseling her, not the other way around.  Perhaps that's how it was, and should have been.

I've run into my share of people like Cunningham, and I try to reassure them that I don't mind much if they can't "affirm" my homosexuality.  It's not really their business anyway.  But if they keep trying to negate it, if they can't let it fade into the background and attend to other traits or interests that we do have in common, we can't be friends.  That's only a problem if they see me not as a person, but as a notch on their missionary bedposts.  But if they do, and if they can accept that I don't affirm what they hold to be a central part of their identity -- their Christianity -- friendship is possible. 

Or consider Rick McKinley, pastor of Imago Dei Church in Portland:

Recently, I spent a year with a guy who thought he was born gay. We spent time working through what I believed to be God’s design for him. I believe God’s design is clearly male/female union or heterosexuality, however, he concluded that God made him that way (homosexual) and wanted to embrace this lifestyle fully. Therefore, he left the church, but it was a healthy parting. I am not sure how you avoid this kind of messiness when building relationships and loving people who are struggling with sexual identification issues [116].

Here too the gay man fades into the background.  It's all about the "healthy parting" and the kinds of "messiness" a pastor has to deal with.

Third one's the charm.  Chris Seay, of Ecclesia in Montrose, Houston:

As I walked closer to the place where our church was positioned, I realized there were three transvestite prostitutes working on the street corner. I decided to strike up a conversation with them, which led to me going inside and bringing them water. They were thirsty, so I gave them something to drink [114].

That's the whole story.  I suppose I should be glad he didn't tell us that the three transvestite prostitutes were so moved by Seay's Christian charity that they joined his church and in a few short months had become linebackers for the Houston Texans; but as it is, they are just props in a story about himself, his compassion, his courage in going near three homosexuals, braving the peril of homosexual cooties. Just like Jesus. 

Throughout unChristian the writers and commentators give the impression that homosexuals are something Out There, a kind of person they've never met before.  (The chapter following "Homosexuality" is "Sheltered," but I think that's the wrong word; "Closed Off" or "Hermetically Sealed" would be more like it.) You'd think the book had been written in the early 1970s, not the first decade of the twenty-first century.  "Despite widespread mobilization over the last decade, most Christians have become even more isolated from homosexuals," Kinnaman declares on page 106.  It may be true of the circles Kinnaman and Lyons and their commentators move in, but as Kinnaman admits,

Our research shows that one-third of gays and lesbians attend church regularly, going to churches across a wide spectrum of denominations and backgrounds, including Catholic, mainline, nonmainline, and nondenominational churches. Most gays and lesbians in America align themselves with Christianity, and one-sixth have beliefs that qualify them as born-again Christians. Most have been active in a church at one time, such as this gay man: “Sometimes it’s hard for me to reconcile the ‘Christian movement’ I see in politics today with the kind, generous people I knew from my own days in the church. I remember the Christians I knew (and once considered myself) to be students of God, who wanted to serve him and spread his good news and message of hope to a needy world.” The bottom line: some gays are antagonistic to Christianity, but many are not [97].

It appears to me that Kinnaman is being disingenuous here, equivocating in a typically conservative-evangelical way.  He'd like the reader to suppose that the gays and lesbians in America [who] align themselves with Christianity" agree that homosexual behavior is sinful, and so do the "wide spectrum of denominations and backgrounds."  No doubt many do, but not those churches that offer union or even marriage ceremonies to same-sex couples, nor the couples who exchange their vows in those churches.

Going by the gay Christians I've known, it's a safe bet that not even all those whose beliefs "qualify them as born-again Christians" agree that they are sinning when they have sex, in marriage or out of it.  UnChristian was published several years before the Supreme Court legalized same-sex civil marriage in the US, but American churches had been examining and revising their positions for decades by then.  Those gay people who still want to join churches have other options available to them than the brand represented by the writers of unChristian.

Because of the increased numbers of more or less openly gay people around, it takes strong determination for conservative Christians to avoid knowing us, or to pretend that they don't know us.  The rise of fundamentalist-run businesses and spaces since the 1980s might have made it easier for evangelicals to avoid dealing with outsiders, but since gay people are already Christians, we are already inside those spaces.  We are already in their families and workplaces and churches.  Even if we are immediately expelled upon discovery, they still have known us.  Perhaps they repress the unpleasant knowledge.

What, then, do Kinnaman and Lyons and their commentators have to offer to Christian LGBT people?  They are carefully vague.  Even the gay man given space at the end of the chapter, one Levi Walker, who reports that he returned to church four years earlier after "twenty years of depression, twelve years of drug addiction and dealing, and several suicide attempts" (117), says nothing about the kind of church he's in now, how it treats him, his place in it.  Walker's the kind of homosexual Christians like Kinnaman love: the drugs, the suicide attempts, the depression -- only AIDS is missing, but nobody's perfect.  The heterosexual commentators, as I noted, mainly talk about themselves and their spirituality, how bad they feel when they're stereotyped as "gay-hating bigots" (110), how they bravely had "real life" (as opposed to imaginary?)  conversations with homosexuals.

To their limited credit, no one in this book touts ex-gay ministries, at least not explicitly.  Maybe they're aware of what ineffective and scandal-ridden scams they are.  But it's fair to find in their ramblings a belief that change will occur once a homosexual joins a welcoming community, and if not that ...

As a church [writes Rick McKinley of Imago Dei], we have to hold to what Scripture says is true about the practice of homosexuality—the acting out of same sex relationships is a sin. However, we are wondering if it is possible to experience same-sex attraction but give yourself to living a celibate lifestyle. What if we could provide intimate Christ-centered community and accountability for him or her in that pursuit? We believe that community is the answer to everyone feeling loved and human [116-17].

Celibacy may be "possible" for a few, just as it's possible for a few to run a mile in under four minutes or scale Mount Everest, but it is not a realistic option for most human beings. Offering it as a solution -- to gay people, not to straights of course -- is not a good-faith approach.  (It's also Albert Mohler's bad-faith recommendation.)  As for experiencing same-sex attraction without acting on it, Kinnaman points out that "Jesus raised the bar beyond skin-on-skin contact and said even a simple thing like sexual thoughts can defile us [Matthew 5:28].  Our approach should embrace this high standard of sexuality" (104).  So Kinnaman's church, at any rate, can't even offer membership to gays on condition of overt sexual abstinence.

"It is necessary and appropriate for Christians to affirm that marriage is between one man and one woman," Kinnaman declares (105).  Appropriate perhaps, but hardly necessary, since the Biblical model was one man and numerous women, whether wives, concubines, or the odd harlot by the side of the road.  That's the original Biblical standard; the New Testament standard is that marriage is for weaklings who can't cut the mustard, either by self-mutilation (Matthew 19:12) or gritting one's teeth and abstaining from sexual life altogether (1 Corinthians 7).  Monogamy became the Christian standard not because of biblical teaching but because gentile Christians adopted Roman customs.

One would think it necessary and appropriate for Christians to affirm that divorce is not acceptable except under very narrowly defined conditions, but although Kinnaman and his commentators occasionally mention divorce as a problem because of our broken sexuality and our decadent society, they don't discuss its acceptance by evangelicals, both for themselves and their chosen politicians.  Ronald Reagan's divorced and remarried status didn't bother them at all, nor does Donald Trump's evangelical base mind his multiple marriages and divorces.  If they can overlook a lifestyle that was specifically prohibited by Jesus, perhaps they can (and probably will) learn to overlook the conflict between the Bible (though not Jesus, at least not explicitly) and same-sex sexual expression.

The olive branch Kinnaman and his commentators hold out to potential gay converts is that everybody's sexuality is "broken."  "But there is not a special judgment for homosexuals, and there is not a a special righteousness for heterosexuals," writes Shayne Wheeler of All Souls Fellowship in Georgia (page 111).  Rev. Alfred Ells of Leaders Last Ministries chimes in:

And I would add this caution: I have counseled many more straight Christians than homosexuals. Many believers are dealing with significant sexual issues, from marital unfaithfulness to pornographic addictions and other things you would not believe. Don’t underestimate the power of sexual problems—gay or straight—to devastate even the best families and the best churches [118].

That, like the recommendation of celibacy, is not going to win many homosexuals for Jesus.  Heterosexuals are granted presumably unbroken sexual expression in marriage, but homosexuals are a "sexual problem" in ourselves, like "pornographic addictions or other things you would not believe," with no loophole.  Fewer and fewer people, gay or straight, will go along with this anymore, and since there is no real moral argument against homosexuality except a biblical prohibition -- which evangelicals are as ready as other Christians to ignore when it's convenient for them -- conservative evangelicals had better expect to see their numbers continue to dwindle.

Kinnaman doesn't advocate secular laws against homosexual activity, though he's not clear as to why. He does claim that "laws provide significant parameters that determine Americans' behaviors, so lawyers and legislators should work diligently to pursue a biblical perspective that achieves appropriate goals" (105).  This is followed by his remark, quoted above, about one-man / one-woman marriage.  Apparently he hasn't heard of the First Amendment.  He concludes that "You change a country not merely by bolstering its laws but by transforming the hearts of its people" (106), but he and his ilk have failed, thankfully, to do even that much -- they have not, on the evidence of this book, even managed to transform their own.

Christians point out the importance of a father and a mother in child development and reject the claims that gay couples should be able to adopt. And, of course, I recognize that it’s offensive to homosexuals to say that a child needs both a father and a mother; it’s a difficult part of what Christians believe. However, though this is an important conviction, Christians have to avoid rhetoric that dehumanizes people, especially in interpersonal interactions. Our most important concern must be the response of young people to Christ, not merely what type of home they grew up in ... If the people of Christ attack, mock, and criticize a child's parents, the chances that the child will ever commit his or her life to Christ are diminished [106].

There's plenty wrong here, starting with the invalid assumption that gay people only become parents through adoption, and moving on to the assumption that if you can't offer an ideal (by Kinnaman's standards) set of parents you should not be allowed to have or raise children at all.  Children have been successfully raised by widowed parents, for example.  I've known children who grew up in households headed by two women, both widowed or abandoned by husbands, who turned out okay.  Children will also have an easier time if their parents aren't poor, or members of other despised minorities; but I doubt Kinnaman would want to take them away from their parents or tell them they should never have been born, no offense kids but your parents fail to meet our high Christian standards of Family.  Same-sex couples, as far as we can tell, do as well by their children as mixed ones; the absence of both male and female in the parent couple doesn't mean the kids won't have meaningful interaction with other adults.  But Kinnaman has evidently ignored all the research and discussion on this matter; if you have Scripture and Christian-Right publications, what more do you need?

I find myself wondering, though, just how he envisions Christians of his sort coming into contact with children of gay parents.  Surely not because the parents attend his church?  Maybe he just visualizes such kids wandering into his youth coffeehouse or being brought to his church by friends.  (It's a trap, kids! Don't go in!)  He even seems to be aware of the harm done by bullying. But in the end, he sees them purely as targets for conversion, though it's not impossible or unlikely that they will already be Christians, attending with their parents a church that Kinnaman doesn't approve of.

It's easy to see, on the evidence of unChristian and other handwringing writings on the declining influence of fundamentalist Christianity, why young people are staying away from their faction in droves.  (It shouldn't be forgotten that all denominations, including liberal ones, have the same problem, if it is a problem for anyone but them.)  I'm not talking only about their reactionary and harmful politics, but about their lack of engagement with actual human beings.  Despite their talk about being confident and fearless in the Lord, they come across in this book as terrified of just about everyone, to the point that having a "real life" conversation with an outsider (or even another Christian with differing views) feels risky and brave to them.  They recommend listening to others, but there's little indication in their own accounts that they do so.  They have to force themselves to make outreach, which is their right but incompatible with their own missionary platform.  As a queer atheist who's worked and talked with a wide range of people who don't agree with me over the years, I had trouble at first realizing how disengaged Kinnaman and his collaborators are.

Whatever they're selling, there's a dwindling market for it.  (I noticed that one of the more successful ministries touted by the commentators is a coffeehouse in Washington, DC, which is still around a dozen years after unChristian was published.  The commercial front, not the evangelism, probably accounts for its longevity.)  That's no ground for complacency, because even small groups of fanatics can do a lot of damage to a society.

I kept thinking of the prominent evangelical Carl F. H. Henry's remark* that "A redemptive totalitarianism is far preferable to an unredemptive democracy; a redemptive Communism far more advantageous than an unredemptive Capitalism, and vice versa."  This implies what should be obvious from much other evidence: Christianity is about purity (doctrinal and moral) and salvation, not about social justice or ordinary human decency.  Sure, you can import a concern with social justice into your implementation of Christianity (many have done it), but it's not the core of Christian concern.  According to the Gospel, helping others is not an end in itself but a means to getting oneself into Heaven.  (Besides, Christianity is about the Kingdom of God, not the Democracy of God.  Its worldview is hierarchical, not egalitarian.)

As I've said before, I don't advocate the a priori exclusion of Christians (or members of other religions) from public discourse.  But their Christianity is independent of whatever of value they have to contribute.  (I feel the same way about many atheists, who are apt to inject their fantasies about "the visions of Bronze Age goatherds" and other village-atheist bullshit to derail serious discussions.)  As unChristian shows once again, even on their own turf conservative evangelicals have very little to contribute; at best they distract from the serious thought and work that needs to be done.

*In The Uneasy Conscience of Modern Fundamentalism, originally published in 1947.  Quoted here.

Allah Bless Us, Every One!

A really sweet story turned up on Twitter today: four years ago an English toddler saw a man with a full white beard on the street and called out "Santa!"  The man heard him, gave him some money, and has continued playing the role of Father Christmas ever since: befriending the boy and his family, giving him and his sister presents for Christmas and on their birthdays.

The punch line is that the bearded man is a Muslim accountant named Hussain.  Which of course is not surprising, because Islam no less than Christianity has normative traditions about charity and kindness.  So do Judaism, Buddhism, Hinduism, and probably all religions.  Not everyone is equally charitable, of course, and what makes the story of Alfie and Hussain so charming is that Hussain's response was so gratuitous, so random.  Given the widespread hostility to Muslims in majority-Christian countries, it also took some courage on his part to come knocking on the door of a Christian family he didn't know, and offer kindness.  So the story also has the exemplary function of encouraging people to ignore cultural and religious prejudice, which is also nice.

But I want to Grinch for a moment, because of one Twitter response that was echoed by numerous others:

Makes me sad that this gentleman embodies the spirit of Christmas so much more than many so-called Christians in America - especially our current POTUS. Actions matter more than words.

Awww, that Mooslim is acting like a Christian!  Since kindness and charitable giving are part of Islam, this remark, though well-meant, sums up the sectarian imperialism of many religious believers.  I'm not singling out Christians here: I imagine that many Muslims or Buddhists or Jews would see a case of Christian generosity the same way, as an approximation of their religion by an unbeliever.  No religion or culture has a monopoly on virtue, especially what might be called consensus virtues.  This story is touching because the impulse and action it describes is a human virtue that would delight people even if we'd never invented religion.  And it appears that many non-human animals exhibit similar behavior.

Nor am I persuaded of the supposed wisdom of children, about which another person gushed.  I see no reason to suppose that Alfie saw Hussain's "kindness" -- he saw the beard -- or that he expected Santa to come right back and see him.  But children also may decide that an old lady with a hooked nose and a big chin is a witch, just because of the way she looks.  Come to think of it, so may adults.

What is "the spirit of Christmas," anyway?  It often seems to be equated with charitable giving, which by Christian norms should be a year-round practice, not a seasonal one.  As I've pointed out before, Christians (and not only Christians, I'm sure) are intensely ambivalent about charitable giving, which they often deride as "handouts," degrading to the recipient and unpleasant but spiritually hygienic to the giver.  Maybe that was why Jesus recommended it, I don't know.  I don't see anything in the Nativity legends of the gospels which foregrounds charity: the Three Wise Men, for example, brought gifts to Bethlehem not out of charity but as tribute to the newborn King of the Jews.  Christmas as a Christian feast day is about the ritual commemoration of the birth of the Savior, not about gift-giving or spending time with family, which are common to numerous religions and/or cultures and characterize other holidays.

Of course you can read anything you like into those stories, as with the Bible or other scriptures generally.  But since generosity and kindness, specifically taking pleasure in doing something for other people, are basic human impulses, I dislike to see religious believers of any stripe trying to take monopolistic credit for them.  But there's also that contrasting, inhibiting impulse, the fear of giving too much and having nothing left, the fear of giving charity to someone who doesn't deserve it, the fear also of being rebuffed by a person afraid of being degraded by a "handout," the fear of looking foolish.  The lesson I take from the story of Hussain and Alfie is one of permission.  It's all right to give, it's all right to receive.  Go, and do likewise.

If You Have Faith, You Shall Turn a Mountain Into a Molehill

While browsing a site I use to track lower prices on ebooks, I found two books that, although I'm not going to buy them, added something to my claim that mainstream Christianity is built on, and still is comfortable with conspiracy theories.

The first is Things Hidden: Scripture as Spirituality by Richard Rohr, published by what appears to be a Catholic press (and it turns out from a glance at his other titles that Rohr is a Father, a Franciscan Friar in fact).  According to the online blurb, Rohr "uncovers what the Bible says about morality, power, wisdom and the generosity of God in a manner that demands a life-changing response from believers. Rohr offers his readers a Christian vision of abundance, grace and joy to counteract a world filled with scarcity, judgment and fear a vision that can revolutionize how we relate to ourselves, others and the world."

There's a lot of bullshit there, but I invite you to take notice of the verb "uncovers."  There's nothing all that suspicious there: much of Christian doctrine appeals to revelation, which means the same thing: the Biblical Greek verb for revelation, apokalypsis, has the sense of "uncovering."  The theme of things formerly hidden but now revealed to believers runs throughout the New Testament; one of the most significant to me is Matthew 11:25, where "Jesus answered and said, I thank thee, O Father, Lord of heaven and earth, because thou hast hid these things from the wise and prudent, and hast revealed them unto babes."  

The idea that important spiritual knowledge had been hidden, by God and by Jesus himself, to be revealed to the Elect for their salvation, a major theme in Christian doctrine, has obvious usefulness.  Originally it justified the newness of Jesus and his cult.  Why weren't these things known before?  Because God hid them until the time was fulfilled, specifically so they could be revealed by Jesus and his followers; not to "the wise and prudent," but to ignorant, unlettered "babes."  Donald Trump's vaunted appeal to uneducated voters has much the same function: you've been ignored and mocked for too long so I'm going to give you the keys to the kingdom; you're so much better than the pointy-headed liberal intellectuals; their so-called knowledge won't save them -- as long as you follow me.

So aside from the frisson that comes from the feeling that you're getting access to hidden knowledge, being invited into to the ultimate in-crowd, there's the obvious marketing function of the scam.  It made The Da Vinci Code a best-seller: The Church has hidden these things from you to keep you in the dark and maintain its power, but now these truths will set you free.  As the historian and biblical scholar Morton Smith wrote, secrecy is a feature of all societies; part of its appeal for children is the glee that comes from having a secret, that grownups don't know about even though they think they're so smart.  But there are secrets at all levels of society.  Rohr's use of hiddenness seems a lot simpler and more harmless than this, though; for him it appears to be a marketing cliche, one as familiar to Christian believers as Christmas Mass.  Most likely his book will consist largely of stuff his readers have heard many times before, dressed up a bit with the pleasure that something hidden is being revealed by a genial friar.  Look at Jesus' purported revelation, in Mark 4, of the secret meaning of the Parable of the Sower; it's a sermon illustration, a tissue of platitudes that hardly lives up to the fanfare.

The other book I noticed today was Slave: The Hidden Truth About Your Identity in Christ by John MacArthur, published by the staid Christian Bible publisher Thomas Nelson.  Here's the description:

A COVER-UP OF BIBLICAL PROPORTIONS...

Centuries ago, English translators perpetrated a fraud in the New Testament, and it's been purposely hidden and covered up ever since. Your own Bible is probably included in the cover-up!

In this book, which includes a study guide for personal or group use, John MacArthur unveils the essential and clarifying revelation that may be keeping you from a fulfilling -- and correct -- relationship with God. It's powerful. It's controversial. And with new eyes you'll see the riches of your salvation in a radically new way.

What does it mean to be a Christian the way Jesus defined it? MacArthur says it all boils down to one word:

SLAVE

"We have been bought with a price. We belong to Christ. We are His own possession."

This -- "fraud," "cover-up," "hidden" -- is exactly the kind of rhetoric that The Da Vinci Code used, for which conservative Christians denounced it.  MacArthur, however, is a conservative evangelical, and his book garnered blurbs from the Southern Baptist divine Albert Mohler (remember him?), the prolific conservative evangelical preacher R. C. Sproul, and an African-American, apparently Episcopalian vicar named the Rev. Dr. Dallas H. Wilson, all gushing about MacArthur's courage in throwing down the word "slave" as the paradigm for Christian believers.  As far as that goes, he's right: the New Testament frequently refers to the believer as the slave of Christ.  I presume that the "fraud" he's referring to is the translation of the Greek doulos as "servant," rather than "slave."  Free-agent servants seem not to have been a feature of the Greco-Roman societies around the Mediterranean; to be a servant was to be a slave, owned by your master until you were either freed by him or managed to save up money enough to buy your freedom.  Even in the sixteenth and seventeenth-century England that gave us the Authorized (aka "King James") Version of the Bible, servants didn't have the kind of freedom that the word now connotes -- no one did -- and slavery was still legal anyway.  

It's debatable, then, whether the first English translators had fraudulent intent in using "servant" as they did; they probably would not have been misunderstood.  As time went on, "slave" and "servant" became more distinct in their meanings, and slavery was abolished first in England and then in America, "servant" in English Bibles acquired an apologetic function.  (Another factor was probably the social and intellectual changes that turned Christianity from a matrix you were born into and couldn't leave into a voluntary association like a lodge.  But that's another subject.)  Christians didn't want to give the impression that God approved of slavery, though it took a good deal of straining at gnats and swallowing of camels to argue that the Bible doesn't take slavery for granted.   In that sense MacArthur isn't wrong to speak of deception, but it's the same kind of apologetic deception involved in explaining away other "hard passages" and doctrines.  Again, his rhetoric is just a marketing ploy.  It lets conservative evangelicals feel the same naughty thrill that fans of The Da Vinci Code got to feel, that they are being initiated into the Truth that murky others tried to keep from them, leaving them safe in the arms of orthodoxy.

It's okay to use conspiracy-theory rhetoric, then, as long as the revelations you're about to make are this toothless.  Christians who imbibe MacArthur's revelations won't probably change their lives as Christians much, if at all: there's already a strong authoritarian streak in their religion.  For the reader, when you see a book by a Christian publisher touting the frauds it will dispel, it's a good idea to keep your hand on your wallet.

Universalize Me, Daddy, Infinity to the Bar

While wasting time this evening I came upon an Amazon listing for a book of essays that had garnered one brief review: "This solipsistic writer thinks he is extremely liberal, but tho he claims all religions are valid, he secretly hates Christians."

Reviews like that usually make their targets more interesting to me.  I noticed that it had four comments, so I clicked through and found that the author of the book had riposted:

It has always been my observation that when a book is trashed by fundamentalists it must really be worth reading... especially, I would say, this one, which respects all the great religions and wisdom traditions. Perhaps that's the real problem. Much of the book repeatedly expresses respect for what is universal in Christianity.

Oh, dear.  That made the book less interesting to me.  I decided to see if the reviewer was just a troll; his other reviews indicate that he's capable of intelligent comment, and for what it's worth, I don't believe he's a Christian fundamentalist -- but that makes the review I noticed all the more discrediting to him.  Even if his target hated Christianity, it wouldn't follow that he hates Christians.

The author's reply, however, is not really a defense of his beliefs or attitudes.  "What is universal to Christianity," whatever he imagines that to be, is of little interest.  If I go by what others have meant when they said something like that, what is "universal" in Christianity is a little collection of platitudes -- be nice to people, love love love, and so on -- that don't really mean anything without some idea how to carry them out, and why.  Being nice to people always comes encrusted with exceptions.  (Was Jesus being nice when he threatened the vast majority of human beings with eternal torment?  Was the Buddha being nice when he told a soldier that if he died in battle he would probably be reborn "in a hell or as an animal"?  And so on.)  So does love.  Justice is at least as murky.  And so on.  I don't know if the poet being trashed is Baha'i, but I looked into that sect during the 80s when I was researching religion, and found nothing much there; the poet does seem to be echoing Baha'i doctrine in his remarks, though.  What the various religions have in common probably has more to do with the fact that human beings invented them, and with cross-cultural and cross-tradition borrowing than with any cosmic universals.

The universal is all very well, but I've learned to be suspicious of those who invoke it, whether in art, religion, sexuality, human nature, or most other realms.  Often they seem to be anxious about, if not hostile to, human difference.  From a safe, nose-holding difference, we are all pretty much alike.  But up close, viewed with interest (which is greater and stronger than love), the differences become apparent, and valuable.  If you can't love the differences, then I question the reality or worth of your love, let alone your spiritual wisdom.

And That Soldier Was -- Albert Einstein!

Today I attended services at a local Korean Baptist church, invited by a friend.  It was a worthwhile experience, though not in the way it was intended to be, and I don't expect to go back.  The people were friendly and welcoming, but while it would be a way to find a commuity of Korean friends -- the reason my friend invited me along -- as an atheist I have no real place there.

The service was more accessible than I expected.  It was, of course, conducted in Korean, which I understand very little, but much of the material was projected on the wall in English; scripture passages and hymns likewise, but in Korean and English.  Again, this would be a great way for me to improve my Korean, if I were a Christian.  But the point is that I was able to understand what was going on much more than I'd expected, without my friend having to interpret for me, and I was intrigued by the glimpse I got into vernacular Protestantism.

Recently I read Georges Bernanos' novel The Diary of a Country Priest (1936, English translation 1937), a classic of pre-Vatican-II piety.  I'm not sure why I chose to read it just now; it has been recommended often, and I don't recall which one moved me to check it out of the library last month. If I didn't know better from the author's own declarations, I'd have suspected it was meant as satire: the title character is a drama queen, full of anxiety and sentimentality.  As one Catholic blogger wrote, the book "might seem at first to be a devil’s parody of a nice Catholic novel. The children are afflicted with lust. The peasants are envious and worldly. The servant is prideful. A noblewoman who is outwardly pious secretly plots her revenge against God. The Catholic Church in France of this time (the 1930s) is riddled with careerism, worldliness, and complacency. Yet under all the seeming appearances the work of God finds a way to fulfillment through the weak vessel of a country priest."

I could not see any "fulfillment" in the book.  Regardless of Bernanos' intentions, I think the Diary can be read as a satire of religious pretension, and the diarist as an unreliable narrator; it was that suspicion that kept me reading to the end, to see how it all came together, or not.  I concluded that an against-the-grain reading doesn't really work, however; Bernanos didn't really know more than his characters did.  Leaving aside the narrator's own theological ramblings, there are long monologues by his wise mentors, on the theme of the Church's steadfast survival against the onslaughts of modernity and mere human weakness.  I think it would be too kind to dismiss these even as platitudes.  Yet it's clear from the testimonies I've seen that many people find them reassuring.  Well, platitudes can be just that, reassuring.

Also recently I finally got around to reading the Dhammapada, a Buddhist scripture consisting of  versified sayings of the Buddha.  In form it resembles the non-canonical gospel of Thomas: the sayings stand alone without context or explanation.  Indeed there's a much later commentary, the Buddhaghosa, which purports to describe the situation in which Gautama delivered these teachings. but I haven't read that.  As I read the Dhammapada, it occurred to me that most of the sayings were platitudes, not unlike Polonius' infamous homilies in Hamlet: Do this, but sometimes do that; be moderate yet extreme; and so on.  Maybe they weren't cliches when they were originally uttered, but I wondered even about that.  I'm sympathetic to the Buddhist worldview, which in the Dhammapada is non-theistic, but I don't believe that it required a miraculous, earth-shaking Enlightenment to come up with these sayings, nor that following their teaching will bring Enlightenment.

So, back to church today.   The pastor sermonized on a few verses from the first letter of John, which also were platitudes.  Love God, love others (though as I know from the rest of these letters, one need not love "false," i.e., dissenting Christian teachers and their followers, but one may throw a hissyfit if they treat one as one means to treat them); follow God's commandments, which are not "burdensome" (though Jesus set very stringent -- probably impossible -- requirements, and commanded his followers to take up their crosses, which are burdensome almost by definition); believe steadfastly that Jesus is the son of God, and you will "overcome the world."  Again, these are platitudes.  They could only be useful to someone who's already in the organization, but then such people are the intended audience both for John's letter and for this sermon.

One funny thing: the pastor used a sermon illustration about two American Civil War soldiers who, returning home at war's end, found themselves in conflict.  One wanted to go to church and give thanks; the other wanted to go to a saloon and get drunk.  They went their respective ways, and the the drinker sank into sin and degradation.  But twenty years later he heard that his pious comrade, Grover Cleveland, had become President of the United States.

Now, never mind that Grover Cleveland didn't serve in the Union Army: he paid a substitute to take his place, as many did.  During the war he stayed in New York state and built his resume "as assistant district attorney for Erie County."  Never mind that one well-known military drunk, Ulysses S. Grant, became President of the United States; use that in a sermon!  These parables aren't meant to be true. Like the equally bogus story of young Albert Einstein giving an atheist professor his comeuppance by "proving" the existence of God, the people who tell them don't care whether they're true.  They're "true in a higher sense."

What I think is significant about this story is that the reward for faith and piety turns out to be thoroughly secular.  What could be more worldly than becoming head of state?  I often have encountered this sort of apologetic move.  One traveling evangelist for Campus Crusade for Christ liked to tell how, before he was saved, he didn't want to be a Christian because he believed all Christian girls were ugly and the guys were nerds; when he found out they were cute and cool, he converted.  But what if they weren't?  George Bernanos would have been appalled by this appeal to lust and the herd instinct, though he'd probably have been secretly gratified by its confirmation of Protestant perfidy.  The promise of secular success is biblical -- Jesus promised his followers "a hundredfold" rewards in this life for what they gave up for his sake -- though probably false far more often than it turns out to be true.  But again, no one much cares.

Maybe this sort of thing has more meaning for people who've hit bottom in their lives.  I never have; I've had my ups and downs, but (so far) never to the point that I couldn't carry on.  Eventually, of course, that is bound to change, if only when I die.  I don't know how much such teachings actually help them; Christian lore is chock-full of stories about people who fell off the wagon repeatedly and died in the gutter, leaving their families to beg for pennies and eventually die of hunger, cold, and consumption, because God needed another angel in Heaven.  But what difference does it make, really?  Does anyone have any better comfort to offer?  Saying that doesn't make religion any more attractive to me, and I'm frankly baffled by what does console so many other people.

The Argument from Design

A friend linked to this story today, gushing:

When I think of Love and Compassion... this is what i imagine. These are the good folks and the Christians who SHOULD be getting media time.

I'm not going to let Christians claim the copyright on helpfulness and compassion. They're universal human traits and practices.

In fact, now that I've read the story, I don't see a notable amount of "love and compassion" in it. The kid, a sixteen-year-old in Memphis, Tennessee, offered to help out in exchange for some food -- which is a perfectly legitimate thing for him to do. The man he offered to work for bought Chauncy a bunch of groceries and drove him home, where he got a look at the conditions he and his disabled mother were living in; that's a good thing, and fits "love and compassion."  He then started a crowdfund for them, which was nice, but it wasn't a gift: the idea was to buy him a lawnmower so he could mow lawns and earn money.  Again, perfectly legit, but not a shining example of love and compassion. I just looked at the GoFundMe page, which is up to more than $74,000 now. And that's very encouraging, and I wish Chauncy well.

Still, a loving and compassionate (not to mention cranky and tired) person might ask: why should any kid be living in poverty? Why should a sixteen-year-old have to support his family? (Yes, that often happens, but is it an ideal to strive and work for?) Does focusing on a story like this to make oneself feel good distract from all the other children and families and single adults who are living in poverty, thanks to an economic and political system that is meant to create large numbers of people at the bottom?  Or does it just make you feel different from all those Christians you disapprove of?

Just before I saw this post I was reading Richard Seymour's blog, and he had this to say about the mindset of those who believe in competition:

If competition is to be the law of all social life, if there are to be winners and losers, if we are to scorn and diminish losers, if we need an 'underclass', a lower-down onto whom to pile the humiliations that are visited on us - well, then, at least let Britain come first. And if we are going to be punished for all our minor transgressions during the boom, for having a little bit of debt, for not saving enough, for not buying enough, for not having a better job, for not working harder, then at least punish them more.

Remember, as a young, poor, black male, Chauncy is just an eye-blink away from being demonized as a superpredator by our respectable leaders and many of the nice older white people I know on Facebook.  It's easy to celebrate an exemplary, hard-working, straight-A student like Chauncy, but you shouldn't have to be a paragon to have a roof over your head or enough to eat.

Even worse, on the GoFundMe page the guy who started the page writes: "last week, by God's beautiful design, he met me." So, all the other kids in poverty who didn't luck out are going hungry "by God's beautiful design." (Remember, Jesus said we will always have the poor with us, so slather on that ointment, baby, for great is your reward in heaven.)

He goes on: "I've never felt so overwhelmed with compassion and faith and joy. I've never felt so good as this moment... What followed was perhaps one of the most cherished experiences of my life." See, it's all about him. And God. Chauncy is just a pawn in the game. Love and compassion? Not by my standards, but I'm an atheist. That's why I get all pissy when people talk about "karma" and "you're in my prayers and thoughts."  If Chauncy and his mother were poor and hungry, that was their karma; who are we mere mortals to judge the Universe?
 
I really should consider taking a sabbatical from Facebook; it's not good for me.  And it's all about me.

You Are Not to Be Like the Hypocrites

One of my Facebook friends, a lovely person but very much into the Culture of Therapy in its Christian forms, shared this meme the other day.  It annoyed me because it went beyond the Culture of Therapy into the paranoid delight in persecution that characterizes historical Christianity, so I wrote a comment on it:

No one should be "afraid" to pray anywhere. Rational people should not be afraid to doubt the prayers' good sense or basic humanity, of course.

What does "afraid" mean here? Can't you bring yourself to pray unless EVERYBODY is standing there and cheering for you? Do you have to be a majority? I'm an atheist, of course, but I know a lot about Christianity, and one thing Jesus never taught was that his followers should be comfortable. As an atheist, I feel the same way. I don't have to be in a majority. I don't have to be comfortable. All I have to do is try to figure out the truth, and go by it.

This is a sore spot with me in general.  I was also annoyed when a student's attempt to block official prayer at his commencement was defended, not on First Amendment grounds, but because "They just wanted to be able to attend their commencement without feeling like an outcast."  Being in a minority doesn't by itself make you an outcast.

Today I took another look at the meme, and remembered a teaching of Jesus from the gospel of Matthew (6:5-6, NASB), that most Christians seem to prefer to forget:

"When you pray, you are not to be like the hypocrites; for they love to stand and pray in the synagogues and on the street corners so that they may be seen by men. Truly I say to you, they have their reward in full.

"But you, when you pray, go into your inner room, close your door and pray to your Father who is in secret, and your Father who sees what is done in secret will reward you."

Maybe people should be afraid to pray "anywhere," since Jesus implies here that they won't get their reward, or pay, from their heavenly Father if they flaunt their piety in public -- and the reward is eternal life, the Kingdom of Heaven.  But of course it's a mistake to take Jesus' teachings literally, so no doubt when he said not to pray in public he meant the exact opposite; that's Christianity.

But don't forget that Jesus and his disciples went around behaving provocatively in public, which led to public controversies with their fellow Jews.  As Graham Shaw wrote in The Cost of Authority (Fortress Press, 1982, p. 246):

But the stories [of the disciples’ violation of Torah] also portray a fundamental contradiction in the religious viewpoint they convey.  For paradoxically the refusal to conform to demands for public religious observance is itself intensely visible; so that the criticism of religious visibility acquires many of the characteristics of exhibitionism.  Repeatedly they attract hostile attention to themselves and their master.  Invisible spiritual religion thus proves to have a highly public face.

I noticed some other intriguing stories about public religion this weekend.  A Missouri middle-schooler claimed that his teacher forbade him to read the Bible, "his favorite book," because "'he don’t believe it, because he feels like he’s shut down,' the boy said."  Well, who knows?  A lot of unbelievers seem to feel they're "shut down" by other people's religious practice (like the student I mentioned above), but when the boy's parents complained, the story "went viral," and the principal investigated, it appeared that the complaint was unfounded.  I'd like to hear more details about what actually happened, but things seems to have settled down and that's probably for the good.

Then I saw an article -- can't find it now -- by Frank Schaeffer, who's evidently an atheist this week, though he still prays.  Maybe he'll eventually cycle back to the evangelical Protestantism of his youth; that would be the logical next step.