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.

Let the End Times Roll

I just finished watching Good Omens, the Amazon Prime miniseries based on Terry Pratchett and Neil Gaiman's 1990 fantasy novel about the Antichrist.  I was never a fan of the novel, which I began reading with rather high hopes that were soon dashed, and I don't understand why so many people love it.  The miniseries is a competent adaptation, with an excellent cast and decent production values.  It seems to be pretty faithful to the book, though I should probably wait until I've reread it to say that.  And, of course, it sparked a rather limp controversy when a fundamentalist Christian group started an online petition begging Netflix to cancel it, sparking amusement in the secular humanist media.

My lack of enthusiasm for Good Omens comes partly from the thinness of the story.  It's basically a parody of The Omen, a horror-movie franchise about the life and hard times of the Antichrist.  (According to the Wikipedia article, the authors didn't seem to recognize the similarities.)  I saw it with friends when it was released in 1976, and hated it because its scariness relied on shock editing: I'd be frightened for a moment, then disgusted for being manipulated.  When a friend made me watch it again thirty years later, I liked it no better but noticed how little sense the story made on its own terms.  It relied on the New Testament mythology of the end times, and the title character's supposed fulfillment of end-times "prophecy."  But there's no real suspense when the prophecy you're fulfilling ends with your ignominious defeat.  The biblical Antichrist is just a cog, not an agent, set up to be knocked down.

Gaiman and Pratchett took The Omen's premise, the son of Satan born to ordinary human parents, and switched him at birth so that both the angelic and demonic hosts lost track of him for eleven years. Because he never gets the training in Evil he was supposed to get, he grows up to be a normal boy, and the heavenly Plan goes awry.  The main characters in the story are the angel Aziraphale and the demon Crowley, who've been working on the same cases since the Creation and have become buddies if not exactly friends.  Both are alienated from their Organizations and go native, becoming so fond of human culture and foibles that they decide to try to stop Armageddon from happening, and (spoiler? nah) succeed, so everything turns out all right.  The world is saved.

I had a creepy feeling as I watched the final episode that it left space for a sequel, which seems not impossible since Amazon has already turned Philip K Dick's The Man in the High Castle into a multi-season series.  Not impossible, but not likely since Pratchett's dead, and Gaiman wouldn't want to mess with a classic - would he?  I don't think the fans would object, though, to seeing more of Aziraphale, Crowley, and Good Omens' other lovable characters; Adam the Antichrist is only eleven years old, and has a lot of growing up to do (Young Antichrist in Love - His First Kiss!); the angelic and demonic hosts have been frustrated in their wish to destroy the world, but not really defeated.  Yes, lots of room for a sequel there.  Luckily for me, I'm not a fan, and will have little interest in watching it if it ever is produced.

I have other quibbles with Good Omens' ... well, call it theology.  An old friend shared this meme on Facebook yesterday, of some screengrabs and dialogue from the program.  Azirophale and Crowley are at the foot of the cross:

.

This might not annoy me so much if other people hadn't come up with similar takes. Kurt Vonnegut, if I recall correctly, wrote something similar in Slaughterhouse-Five.  It's ironic, though not at all unusual, when clever people who despise fundamentalists for their ignorance get something so fundamentally wrong.  Of course Pratchett and Gaiman were entitled to make up any Jesus they find appealing, but it's significant that their Jesus is such a cliche.

For what it's worth, according to the gospels Jesus was not crucified for telling people to be kind to each other.  He was crucified because it was God's plan, determined before the creation of the world and leaked to the Hebrew prophets, that he should die for the sins of humanity.  That's the story, and Pratchett in particular was very aware of the importance of stories, though he tended to forget it when he had an ax to grind.  It can be argued that the Romans who executed him didn't know they were puppets on the divine hand, but fairness demands that we attend to what they thought the reasons were.  The gospels give us that, and it's plausible in light of what crucifixion was for: all four canonical gospels agree that Jesus' cross bore the legend "King of the Jews."  According to Matthew, that was exactly what he was, and Pontius Pilate, Caesar's agent in Judea, was supposed to keep little Anticaesars in check.  It's not clear, though, where the charge came from; it's not mentioned in any of the gospel accounts of Jesus' trials.  Certainly "He said we should be kind to each other" didn't figure when Jesus was brought before Pilate.

Remember the story, set just before Jesus' arrest, of Jesus' witticism "Give Caesar what is Caesar's, and God what is God's." Many interpreters have been sure they knew what secret message Jesus meant to send with that ambiguous bon mot.  It's common to argue that he couldn't have said straight out to defy the Roman occupation of Eretz Israel because the Romans would have arrested and executed him as a rebel.  But they did arrest him and execute him as a rebel, and that was, after all, his mission: to be crucified.  The exact charge was almost immaterial.  Perhaps, going by the motif that "his time had not yet come," Jesus didn't want to be executed yet: he had to die, as the gospel of John has it, as the sacrificial Passover lamb, and not a minute sooner.  (Unfortunately, the other gospels have a different chronology.)

Nor did it come up earlier, when Jesus was brought before Jewish officials for interrogation.  According to the gospel of Mark, there were false accusations (which may have been true) that Jesus had threatened to destroy the Jerusalem temple.  Finally the High Priest asked Jesus point blank, "Are you the Messiah, the son of the Blessed?"  Jesus replied, "I am, and you will see the Son of Man sitting at the right hand of Power and coming with the clouds of Heaven."  The High Priest tore his robes, denouncing Jesus' "blasphemy," and the council agreed that Jesus deserved to die.  Like most of the Passion story, this makes little sense: as far as we know, claiming to be the Messiah was not blasphemy, nor was it an offense in Judaism, let alone a capital one.

There are other possible reasons for Jesus' execution, such as the conflicts between him and other Jewish teachers on aspects of Torah, which would have stirred up a lot of bad feeling but were normal in first-century Judaism, and not capital crimes either. But teaching love and kindness -- which was where Jesus and other Jewish teachers agreed -- never comes up in the gospels as a reason for his death.

Something else that occurred to me as I watched Good Omens was that the Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse were depicted as agents of Satan, sent by him to initiate and lead the forces of Evil against the Hosts of Heaven in their final conflict.  That seemed off, so I looked at the Revelation of John, which is the source for most of this mythology.  Sure enough, the Four Horsemen are agents of Heaven rather than Hell, sent by the Lamb to soften up the earth by slaughtering millions. Only after a third of humanity has been killed will "the beast that comes up out of the abyss ... make war with them" (Revelation 11:9).  Admittedly the chronology here is confused, but it seems that the Antichrist hasn't even been born yet.

Not that Pratchett and Gaiman were obligated to follow John's convoluted narrative.  But it's significant that they decided (if they were even aware they were making a change) to change the  Four Horsemen's team colors.  They also tried to distance the angels (depicted as soulless, vicious bureaucrats) from God, who narrates the TV version as the wise, soothing voice of Frances McDormand.  Maybe, they suggest urgently, all this Armageddon stuff isn't God's ineffable plan after all but just the mischief of Her underlings who have somehow slipped the leash?  Devout Christians, trying to exculpate their omnipotent, omniscient deity of all responsibility for his actions and those of his organization, could go along with that.  And it does leave room for a sequel, the which may Hell forbid. 

Think, for some more examples, of Philip Pullman's His Dark Materials trilogy, in which it turns out that the guy everybody thought was God wasn't God after all but some elderly loser.  The same copout is used in Star Trek V: The Final Frontier, featuring a quest for God at the center of the galaxy; once again, the being who claimed to be God is a fraud, not the real God. It's an admission of inability, which is reasonable enough, to imagine how human beings would engage with, let alone defeat, an omniscient, omnipotent being.  But it's still a copout, a step away from "And then he woke up and it had all been a dream."

It's a familiar pattern to me: ostensible unbelievers still insist that as bad as his followers have been, Jesus was a really nice guy who just wanted us all to get along and be nice to each other.  Maybe he was; nobody knows.  But there's no basis, except some sort of strange wishful thinking, for dogmatically declaring so.  More important, it seems to me, is a powerful desire to imagine themselves on the side of the really good guys, and to be able to look down in safety on the eternal torment of the really bad guys. And that's no improvement on the hatefulness of standard Christianity; it just reshuffles the name tags of the players.

This is why Good Omens disappointed me when I read it almost thirty years ago.  I'd really like to see some fiction which radically reimagined Christian mythology without trying to save some remnant of orthodoxy, and challenged unbelievers (including me) as much as it challenged believers.  I'm not calling for a negative, villainous Jesus (though I'm fine with that in principle), but for a neutral one.  I doubt such fiction would go over well with the people who like books like Good Omens, though.  They (fans and, I think, the authors) want to dispose of the God and the Jesus of orthodox Christianity, but they still want to believe that there's a fond sky Daddy who's on their side against the world, and who'll protect them from all harm.  They're entitled to wish for that, but I'm not obligated to give their wish any more respect than I give other forms of religious belief.

The Satisfied Mind of American Fundamentalism

Speaking of the Bible, I just read Carl F. H. Henry's 1947 tract The Uneasy Conscience of Modern Fundamentalism. Henry (1913-2003) was a prominent fundamentalist / evangelical divine and intellectual, a founding editor of Billy Graham's neo-evangelical magazine Christianity Today.

The book is still in print after seventy years, which isn't surprising because fundamentalism ought to have an uneasy conscience quite apart from the doctrine of Original Sin.  Most serious human problems tend to persist despite much handwringing about them, which is why people mistake older complaints for prophecy.  I thought Henry's book might be worth reading because it reminded me of Albert Mohler's We Cannot Be Silent, which I confess I still haven't read yet: a heartfelt cry that traditional Christianity must stop being so narrow and address modern issues sincerely or it will die out, and then what will happen?*

I was also curious to see which issues made Henry's conscience uneasy in the 1940s.  Homosexuality and gender were issues in those days, but in different ways.  Women had just lost some of the gains they'd made during the war, forced out of jobs they'd held successfully in order to free them up for returning men.  Gay people who'd gotten a taste of freedom, despite official prohibitions, found that they were no longer indispensable; and many were discharged dishonorably and had to rebuild their lives.  The postwar gay and feminist movements emerged from these problems, but they had little visibility or influence for a long time.  So what did Carl Henry think evangelicals had failed to deal with in 1947?

Henry lays it out right away:

[S]uch admitted social evils as aggressive warfare, racial hatred and intolerance, the liquor traffic, and exploitation of labor or management, whichever it may be.  

The social reform movements dedicated to the elimination of such evils do not have the active, let alone vigorous, cooperation of large segments of evangelical Christianity.  In fact, Fundamentalist churches increasingly have repudiated the very movement whose most energetic efforts have gone into an attack on such social ills.  The studied Fundamentalist avoidance of, and bitter criticism of the World Council of Churches and the Federal Council of Churches of Christ in America is a pertinent example [loc 105 of the Kindle edition].

So far so good, I guess.  Since 1947 "the liquor traffic" has largely been replaced by a concern with "drugs," and "the exploitation of labor or management" is an intriguing bit of false equivalence.  Henry repeats the phrase several times but never expands on the point to make sense of it; later he says that the "The problems of management or labor were now referred not to a regeneration-conditioned submission to the divine will but rather to the leftist precepts of political Socialism or Communism" [loc 220-225], which is not much help.

Fundamentalism, says Henry,

was a Bible-believing Christianity which regarded the supernatural as a part of the essence of the Biblical view; the miraculous was not to be viewed, as in liberalism, as an accidental and superfluous accretion [loc 125].

I don't see that this stress on the supernatural makes much practical difference.   Henry warns that

to become articulate about evangelicalism and its social implications was not an easy task.  There is the danger that it might involve an unstudied and superficial analysis of the specific modern evils.  For example, one recent Fundamentalist discussion of the social program of the Federal Council of Churches bitterly condemns the Communist leftist trends in that group, while exhibiting a contrasting silence about the evils of a Capitalistic system from which the redemptive reference is largely abstracted [loc 245].

There's always the danger of an unstudied and superficial analysis of specific evils, no matter where you're coming from.  Nothing, as far as I can see, prevented Fundamentalists from producing a studied, deep analysis.  They would have claimed that "the supernatural" guided them away from "leftist Communist trends," but why didn't it guide them to something better?  Henry frets about this, but he has no answers.  Over the long haul, Fundamentalism has consistently chosen the unstudied and superficial.  There were individual exceptions, of course, but they weren't representative or influential in the movement. 

It should be emphasized that this despair over the present world order grows, for contemporary Fundamentalism, not out of any lack of confidence in the ability of the supernaturalistic Gospel. Rather, it issues from the fact that the Scriptures, as interpreted by premillenarians and amillenarians, hold forth no hope for the conversion of the whole world, and center upon the second coming of Christ as crucial for the introduction of a divine kingdom.  The despair over the present age, then, is grounded in the anticipated lack of response to the redemptive Gospel, rather than in any inherent defect in the message itself [loc 200].

I wonder about this.  When the Southern Baptist Convention broke with other Baptists in the 19th century to support slavery, the "despair over the present age" Henry mentions was hardly present.  Nor was it when the Southern Baptists joined with other denominations to defend white supremacy after Brown v. Board of Education a few years after The Uneasy Conscience of Modern Fundamentalism was published.  A couple of times Henry writes something like "There are here and there conservative denominational groups, like the Reformed movements and the great Southern Baptist Convention, which have maintained or are beginning to reflect a vigorous social interest" (loc 606).  I wonder what "vigorous social interest," aside from Jim Crow, Henry thought the SBC was maintaining.  White racist Fundamentalists did not seem hampered by an "anticipated lack of response to the redemptive Gospel" they proclaimed.  People don't choose their courses of action because of their interpretations of Scripture; they interpret Scripture to rationalize the course of action they choose.

Henry isn't entirely unaware of this.  Early on he admits

the shifting standards in various sections of the country among Fundamentalists themselves.  Among evangelicals, for example, smoking is hardly considered that sin in the southern tobacco-growing states that it is in the north.  And the northern Baptist pastor who would join his wife for mixed public swimming would be called before his board of deacons in many a southern church [loc 145-50]

And so on.  But, like racial segregation, these who promulgated these regional differences would have regarded them as God's will, questioned only by Communist haters of Christ.  Henry laments that

While the modern world wrestles with its global dilemma, the evangelical conscience is troubled because the historic Christian message is dismissed arbitrarily as a dead option for dissolving the ills of Occidental culture [loc 175].

But why shouldn't it be dismissed?  In the case of slavery and white supremacy, the "idealistic atmosphere of judgment upon its environment in any age" (loc 259) Henry touts came down squarely against emancipation and racial equality.  The SBC later (in the 1990s) repented and apologized for those judgments, but why?  If Christians don't stand firm against the spirit of the age, how surprising is it that their message is dismissed -- not at all arbitrarily -- as a dead option?  And now that Fundamentalists like Albert Mohler are drawing a line in the sand over sexual orientation and gender identity, why should anyone credit them with any moral authority?  While the modern world wrestles with its global dilemma, the evangelical conscience is more concerned with whether the Thousand Year Reign of Christ will happen before or after the Rapture.

As against secular humanism, Fundamentalism has consistently witnessed to the fact that any culture from which the redemptive element is absent is essentially distinct from the kingdom of God [loc 366].

I don't imagine that even in 1947, Henry would have wanted to claim that "the redemptive element" was present when Southern Baptists executed a schism in support of slavery.  But why not?  Surely the SBC would have claimed that it was.  As an atheist, I am neither competent to, nor interested in deciding where the redemptive element was present and where it was absent.  I think such cases show that appeals to the redemptive element are at best irrelevant, even frivolous.  Far from leading, Fundamentalists have usually followed, and then tried to take credit for whatever improvements were enacted.

And here's a curious claim.

No political or economic system has utopian promise if the essential redemptive ingredient is missing from it. A redemptive totalitarianism is far preferable to an unredemptive democracy; a redemptive Communism far more advantageous than an unredemptive Capitalism, and vice versa. But the very element which is abstracted from currently proposed solutions is this redemptive element [loc 565].

As I've said before, I'm not much interested in utopias.  Leaving that aside, what the hell is a "redemptive totalitarianism"?  I don't think Henry would consider the antebellum South to have much of the "redemptive element," because its elites weren't evangelicals.  No doubt he thought a redemptive totalitarianism would be tolerable -- to him -- because it would be run by people like him. Whether it would be tolerable to those groaning in its dungeons and torture chambers, even if they were evangelicals, is another question.  By contrast, a nonredemptive democracy, while filling its citizens' stomachs, providing them with an education and shelter and medical care, would allow Fundamentalists to seek and preach redemption on their terms.  This would not be enough for Henry, or for his theological descendants; he wanted evangelical domination.

Evangelicalism, Henry declares, "must contend for a fair hearing for the Christian mind, among other minds, in secular education ... [T]he universities seem studiously to avoid the competent presentation of the Hebrew-Christian view by those who hold it" [loc 533].  A fair hearing might not, probably would not, lead to the outcome Henry assumes it would.  Like political conservatives of a later generation, Henry is essentially calling for affirmative action for his sect.  Of course I'm not being quite fair there, because affirmative action is not supposed to give positions to the unqualified.  If anything, the Reagan era showed that liberal humanists were all too willing to tolerate and even endorse incompetent clowns from the religious or cultural right.  There have been Christian, even Fundamentalist thinkers who are competent, capable of deep, studied analysis; but they were generally attacked by their brethren and kicked out of their institutions.  But those aren't the Fundamentalists Henry has in mind when he whines that "It is quite popular at the moment to crucify the Fundamentalist" (loc 449).  (Shouldn't a real Christian celebrate that, especially since the 'crucifixion' he's talking about is purely figurative?  This is like a child yelling that his parents hate him because they make him go to bed or take a bath.)

There are those who point to the participation of Christian ministers and laypeople in the Civil Rights movement to try to vindicate religion in general, and Christianity in particular, as a moral force.  It's important to remember that that movement, opposed by many (most?) white evangelicals, was not driven or motivated by religion: rather it used religion as a lever.  Both racists and antiracists claimed  to possess the "redemptive element."  Henry is no help.  On his own account, as you can see from the passage about "redemptive totalitarianism," it seems to be irrelevant in dealing with these questions.  He has no substantive suggestions for social amelioration or reform, and as can be seen by the sides they took in the following decades, neither did other evangelicals.

The reason I think it's worthwhile to examine this old book is to compare it with the work of today's evangelicals.  Little has changed in their assumptions, basic claims, or complaints about how unfairly the larger culture has treated them.  Their consciences may be uneasy, but their confidence, indeed their pride in their right to dictate to "the world" (including other Christians), is intact.

Having said all this, I must add that neither liberal Christianity, any other religion, secular humanism, or revivalist atheism has authority either.  Every important question has to be approached critically, with awareness of human limitations and our abundant history of failure.  No one has a monopoly on knowledge or wisdom.  Even Fundamentalists may participate in the discussion, not because they are believers and not despite it.  I suppose they should be allowed a minute or two to preach when goals and tactics are being evaluated, but if they can't address the issues apart from that, they're declaring that they have nothing to contribute, that Fundamentalism is a dead option.  The choice is theirs.

------------------------------
* Indeed, Mohler contributed a chapter on Henry to a 2001 book on theologians of the Baptist tradition.

Hold That Thought

I"ve begun reading Louise Erdrich's new novel Future Home of the Living God (Harper, 2017), which so far appears to be a satirical speculative-fiction novel worthy of (now late) Ursula Le Guin, only with a sharper edge.  I love much of Le Guin's work, though I don't think she ever made me even chuckle, and at times she could be obnoxiously pompous.  Not that there's anything wrong with that, I'm not casting the first stone.

But I digress.  It's a pleasure to see Erdrich, a Turtle Mountain Chippewa, skewering some fantasies about Native Americans, starting with her narrator, a twenty-six-year-old adoptee named Cedar Songmaker who learns that her biomom back on the reservation is named Mary Potts, Senior.  Cedar goes to meet her birth family, and muses on the End Times material she sees along the way.  (Something big is happening to the world, that's the speculative-fiction part, but just what hasn't been explained yet.)  I'm taking this as part of the satire, please Jesus:

Perhaps all of creation from the coddling moth to the elephant was just a grandly detailed thought that God was engrossed in elaborating upon, when suddenly God fell asleep.  We are an idea, then.  Maybe God has decided that we are an idea not worth thinking anymore.

Hold that thought.

A week ago, a Facebook friend from high school who's lost the struggle with Christianity posted a link to an online preacher's video dedicated to the proposition that in Scripture, Every. Word. Matters.

Now, this is of course absurd.  I posted a comment pointing out that if every word matters it would have to be words in Greek or Hebrew, and because of textual variation in the New Testament especially, you can rarely be sure what the exact words are.  Few of these variations make any difference in overall meaning or doctrine, but that's just the point.  In that previous sentence I could have written "seldom" rather than "rarely" and the meaning would have been roughly the same, but the exact word would not.  My friend replied that he knew all that, that he subscribes to the doctrine of plenary verbal inspiration, and every word of the Bible testifies to God's love and care for us.  We left it there, with me giggling in the eternal silence of the Internet, but the exchange sent me back to James Barr's fine 1977 book on fundamentalism.

Barr pointed out that most fundamentalists officially distance themselves from "dictation" theories -- the idea that the Holy Spirit told the biblical writers exactly what to write, word for word -- but plenary verbal inspiration is mainly an attempt to have a dictation theory without calling it one.  Lay believers like my friend who don't know any language but their own have trouble grasping the problems involved in translation, the difficulty of finding equivalents in one language for the words of another, or the problems raised by textual variation. The phrase "plenary verbal inspiration" ought to include "of the original manuscripts," a late nineteenth-century attempt by Professor B. B. Warfield of Princeton University to make sense of the phenomena.  This inspired more critical scholars to joke about "the Princeton Bible," compiled from the (non-extant) original manuscripts.

Conservative scholars who hold to plenary verbal inspiration have a rough time of it.  In Fundamentalism Barr quotes numerous examples of their efforts to maintain the Bible's freedom from error, for example:

We move to yet another venerated conservative publication, The New Bible Dictionary (Inter-Varsity Press 1962), and J.  A. Thompson there tells us (pp 271f.): “[Genesis] I has an artificial literary structure and is not concerned to provide a picture of chronological sequence but only to assert the fact that God made everything.’  Only that God made everything!  How are the mighty fallen! and how ridiculous a mouse has the mountain of fundamentalist interpretation brought forth!  What radical ‘liberal’ or wild ‘modernist’ did not believe ‘only’ that God had made everything? [Fundamentalism (Westminster Press, 1977), 41-2] 

But it isn't only fundamentalists who resort to such feeble expedients.  The highly sophisticated, non-fundamentalist, ostensibly non-theist philosopher Mary Midgley, drawing on Origen and St. Augustine, wrote that

the Genesis story simply describes the total dependence of all creatures on a ruling benevolent spirit and does this through a myth: an imaginative vision that is the most appropriate way of bringing such vast and mystifying facts within human comprehension.  The details of the story are merely shaped to make this central point clear [The Solitary Self (Acumen, 2010)].

The total dependence of all creatures on a ruling benevolent spirit!  Of course there is no such being, certainly not the god of the Bible, and even such a vaguely platitudinous "central point" is not necessarily or obviously what the writer had in mind.  No doubt he also believed it, but as Barr went on to note:

In fact the only natural exegesis is a literal one, in the sense that this is what the author meant.  As we know from other parts of Genesis, he was deeply interested in chronology and calendar, and he depicted the story of creation in a carefully and deliberately arranged scheme of one week.  As Kevan, cited above, rightly sees, the ‘evening’ and ‘morning’ phraseology clearly indicates that he thought of a day such as we understand a day to be; but that is only one of the multitudinous details of the story which show that the seven-day scheme is essential to his way of describing the creation [42].

In other words, the author of Genesis, though he or she probably would have agreed with Midgley about the dependence of all creatures on their creator, had other fish to fry.  All those multitudinous chronological details aren't there as mere ornament, they have a function, and it won't do to brush them lightly aside.  The irony here is that though Midgley, the daughter of a parson, despises fundamentalists, she interprets the Bible like one.  Or vice versa -- as Barr shows, fundamentalist scholars often interpret the Bible as if they were liberals.  The same is true of the message my Facebook friend finds in Scripture.  I don't believe it, either as a governing principle of the universe or as "the" overarching message of the Bible, but it's a doctrine that the most liberal, even wildly modernist Christian could agree on.  You wouldn't even have to be a Christian to believe it; such platitudes are beloved of theists of many stripes.

So back to the passage I quoted above from Louise Erdrich.  I hope it's satire, though I fear it's the kind of vacuity that even the bitterest satirists will come up with to show that they're really big softies at heart.  Once again I'm disappointed by the conceptions of gods that people who reject conventional religion come up with: in this, a deity who nods off at its station, allowing his creation to fall apart.  Cedar's musings would be better reversed, I think: If God has lost interest in us, that doesn't trump our interest in ourselves. God is an idea, an idea we should decide is not worth thinking anymore.

Saying No in Ways That Sound Like Yes

Thanks to Alas, a Blog, I found this curious essay at slacktivist.  The writer, Fred Clark, asks a useful question: The Biblical position on women's equality, especially in the churches, is still being debated after centuries, with no resolution in sight; so is the Biblical position on homosexuality.

Given the apparent insolubility of those battles over clobber texts, it’s strange to consider that another similar argument — one far more heated and contentious — has simply vanished entirely. This was a fierce argument over biblical interpretation that split denominations and congregations, shaping and reshaping America’s churches, American culture and, ultimately, America’s Constitution. And then, abruptly, it just ended. It was settled, once and for all, and no credible person living today regards it as even slightly controversial.

I’m talking about slavery...

After summarizing some of the debate on slavery and the Bible from the 1800s, Clark concludes:

The dispute wasn’t resolved by exegesis or by theological argument. It was, rather, as Mark Noll wrote, “left to those consummate theologians, the Reverend Doctors Ulysses S. Grant and William Tecumseh Sherman, to decide what in fact the Bible actually meant.”

That's cute, but it overlooks a few things. Yes, it took the most horrific war in history up to that time, with 600,000 or so dead and many more wounded and maimed, to bring slavery to an end -- in the United States.  In England, by contrast, slavery was abolished in 1833 by act of Parliament without resort to warfare.  As this timeline from Wikipedia indicates, the US is the exception rather than the rule when it comes to the abolition of slavery.  If Clark were serious about the biblical and theological aspects of slavery, a look at how they were handled in England and other Christian countries would be instructive.  (I notice that the next day, he posted about American exceptionalism, though I haven't bothered to read that one.  But his post on slavery is a textbook case of American exceptionalism: it's all about Us, and outside our borders no one has dealt with this issue at all.  I daresay he knows better -- but in this post he chose not to know better.)

Did the Civil War resolve "what in fact the Bible meant" about slavery?  It did not.  It would be interesting to follow the theological discussion of slavery in the US after 1865, and see just how and why biblical defenses of slavery were abandoned.  Although slavery was formally abolished de jure, it survived de facto in various forms, and white supremacy was defended on Biblical grounds well into the twentieth century.

Still, as far as the US is concerned, the blogger is more or less correct: hardly any American Christian nowadays will defend slavery on biblical grounds. Most Christians try to ignore the biblical evidence, and explain it away if they must confront it.  (The same is true of secular rationalizations of slavery: I've argued before that drapetomania, a purported disease which caused slaves to run away from their masters, does not seems to have been proven bogus so much as abandoned in embarrassment.  Scientific racism, of which drapetomania is an example, endures to this day, however.)

In sum, Clark writes,

That’s a huge, enduring problem for American Christianity. For one thing, it doesn’t offer any potential approach for resolving other theological and interpretive disputes. Opponents of women’s equality will continue to cite 1 Timothy 2:12 as authoritative proof that they are right, while advocates of women’s equality will offer alternative interpretations, but neither side will have the option of settling the matter definitively by burning Atlanta.

But the larger problem is this: We have concluded that some of our foremost and most influential theologians, pastors, and biblical scholars were utterly wrong about a monumentally important matter of biblical truth. Yet, because we choose not to explore why or how they were wrong, we are unable to learn from their grievous mistake. We have no way of knowing whether or not we are, in fact, repeating their mistake. We have no way of avoiding such a repetition.

Now, this confuses me.  Even if we could burn Atlanta, would it really 'settle the matter' of women or homosexuals in the church?  I don't think it would, and I don't believe that Fred Clark believes so either.  As he acknowledges, the question of slavery wasn't really settled but abandoned by American Christians; I don't think that's really the outcome he wants for other issues.

I'm especially confused by the claim that "we have concluded that some of our foremost and most influential theologians, pastors, and biblical scholars were utterly wrong about a monumentally important matter of biblical truth."  I can't tell for sure, but I guess he means that virtually all twenty-first century Christians now believe that slavery is wrong, and I guess he believes that he regards the contrary view as held by "some of our foremost theologians, pastors, and biblical scholars" is a "mistake."  Or maybe the mistake lay in letting the Civil War settle the issue of slavery: American religious thinkers and teachers abandoned their obligation to determine "biblical truth" for themselves.  But he seems to have lost the thread of the argument.

There are two separate questions here. The one on the table, so to speak, is whether slavery is wrong according to the Bible.  There is no reason to think so, as Clark more or less admits.  The other question is whether slavery is wrong (or right, for that matter), regardless of what the Bible says about it.  I think Clark confuses the issues, and that's why the article as a whole makes little sense.

By "clobber passages" Clark means the parts of the Bible that treat slavery as morally unproblematic, an institution to be regulated but not abolished, and indeed a model for the relationship between the believer and Christ.  He also means the parts of the Bible that assume or explicitly endorse male supremacy, the subordination of women.  But these are not isolated passages which can be used to "clobber" critics who reject these practices and principles: they permeate the Bible from beginning to end.  (The passages relating to male homosexuality, by contrast, are relatively isolated, but there is really no Biblical material that counters them.)  This is relatively uncontroversial; no honest scholar would deny that the Bible treats slavery and male supremacy as unproblematic, and I've noticed that numerous gay Christian apologists admit that the Bible treats male homosexuality as a serious sin even as they try to explain away the problem ("clobber") passages.

The question, then, is not 'what the Bible says' about these issues -- that's clear enough -- but what to do about aspects of the Bible that modern Christians can no longer accept as authoritative.  There are many of them, not limited to these three issues, and not all Christians today reject them.  But Clark seems to think that if we could just really understand what the Bible says, we could resolve these theological and interpretive disputes.  I think the English scholar and theologian Dennis E. Nineham identified this problem in The Use and Abuse of the Bible (Harper & Row, 1976, p. 205):

If I may quote Leonard Hodgson again, it must be on the understanding that quoted out of context he may seem to be saying more than he intended to; or should I say that he spoke more wisely than he knew?  'For too long,' he writes, 'study of the biblical writers (and, for the matter of that, of patristics, scholastics, reformers and the rest) has been based on the assumption that someone, somewhere, at some time in the past, really knew the truth, that what we have to do is find out what he thought and get back to it.'  It may be significant that this statement occurs in Hodgson's last book; for years he had been moving towards it.  My only doubt is whether even in the end he applied it with quite sufficient rigour either to Jesus or to the architects of trinitarian and Christological orthodoxy.

What Nineham is talking about here is the doctrine of biblical inerrancy, which most people confuse with "literalism."  It holds that the Bible, properly understood, is without error, and that if there seems to be something wrong with the Bible, it's really the reader or interpreter who has gone wrong.  Very non-literal interpretation is necessary to get rid of the inconvenient material. No issue can be resolved with this approach.  If you start at your end point -- the conclusion you want to reach -- only those who agree about the conclusion will find your interpretation plausible, and your critics will easily show what you got wrong. That accounts for most of the endless debate Clark laments, I think. It also indicates why that debate won't end.

The philosopher Walter Kaufmann also addressed this issue a quarter century before Nineham, in his book The Faith of a Heretic.  (I'm quoting from the 1963 Anchor paperback edition.)  In a print debate with the philosopher Karl Jaspers, the influential Protestant scholar and theologian Rudolf Bultmann asked rhetorically: "He [i.e., Jaspers] is as convinced as I am that a corpse cannot come back to life and rise from his tomb ... What, then, am I to do when as a pastor, preaching or teaching, I must explain texts ... ?  Or when, as a scientific theologian, I must give guidance to pastors with my interpretation?" (quoted by Kaufmann, 95).  Kaufmann commented:

Up to this point, Bultmann had generally referred to "the Easter event," and students had debated just what, according to Bultmann, had happened at the first Easter.  Now Bultmann let the cat out of the bag, not only about one particular belief but about the nature of theology ... 

Bultmann, asked about eternal torture in a conversation, said that on that subject he agreed with Lessing.  He had every right to expect that a younger colleague, no less than a student, would proceed to the nearest library and begin reading through a set of Lessing's works, in search of the crucial passage.  After the first ten volumes, he could safely be expected to give up.  Encouraged by my American training, however, I asked: "And what did Lessing say?"  The great theologian hesitated, then allowed that Lessing had once said somewhere that if even a single soul were in eternal torment he would certainly refuse to go to heaven.  It would seem, then, that Bultmann disbelieves in any form of eternal punishment.  In his huge Theology of the New Testament, hell and eternal damnation are simply ignored.

This refusal to let one's No be a No is one of the central characteristics of theologians no less than of committed Communists.  One does not emphasize one's points of disagreement with tradition or the scriptures; instead one emphasizes points of agreement and sidesteps embarrassing issues by raising questions of exegesis.  As a consequence, the agreement among committed believers is, to a surprisingly large extent, apparent only ...

[An American Protestant theologian like Paul] Tillich, like [Reinhold] Niebuhr, shares few of [Billy] Graham's religious beliefs ... But, like Bultmann, they say No in ways that sound like Yes [95-97].

I think this is a bit unfair to theologians: the behavior Kaufmann describes here is also common among lay believers.  (For that matter, Jesus often said Yes in ways that sounded like No, and vice versa. Consider "Render unto Caesar what is Caesar's," which cannily dodges taking a stand on the very live issue of Roman taxation in first-century Judea and Galilee.) Theologians, because of their specialist knowledge, probably feel the conflict between apologetics and scholarship more acutely -- though that doesn't stop them from trying to evade it.  One of the first commenters on Clark's post wrote sarcastically:

Gosh, if only there were an all good, all powerful being who loved us deeply that could manifest itself and bring clarity to these sorts of issues. That would certainly help end a lot of arguments.

To which another commenter replied, apparently in all seriousness:

If only he had. But, he didn't clarify. He, in fact, made the law into a square circle that institutionized racism, sexism, and slavery and also commanded love and the golden rule. At no point does the bible even theoretically acknowledge a conflict. So, for biblical literalists, or at least those who believe God made the old law based on perfect morality, you're stuck trying to square that circle of being both loving and oppressive.
-
If Jesus existed, was God made manifest, and was morally perfect, and wanted this clear, he had ample opportunity to clarify the evils of slavery, of making women into a second class of person, etc. At ,east according to the bible, he did not make use of that opportunity.
-
So, yeah, it would have been nice, for Christianity, had Jesus clarified the matters.

From there the discussion turned largely into a debate about the historical reliability of the gospels, but that's not really important here.  I'm more interested in the fact that these people clearly want to see Jesus and the Bible as authoritative guides to morality, and they expect God's morality to agree with theirs, but it doesn't seem to occur to the second commenter that Jesus might not have bothered to "clarify" matters like slavery, not only because he agreed with the status quo of his time and place, but because he didn't see these issues as important matters of biblical truth.  And if you're a Christian, Jesus' opinion presumably counts for more than yours.

According to the gospels, Jesus believed that the Kingdom of God was "at hand," that is, it was going to be established on earth ("as it is in heaven") within the lifetimes of most of his followers.  (The rest of the New Testament is built on this assumption.  I'm not as informed on the "gnostic" scriptures as I am on the canonical ones, but they don't seem any more concerned with social justice, as opposed to individual spiritual purity, than the New Testament is.)  What mattered was not working for social justice but making oneself ready for the coming judgment, which would not be based on whether one owned slaves or allowed women to preach, but on other criteria that aren't spelled out coherently in the New Testament.  This doctrine is summed up in a well-known problem passage, "The poor you will always have with you, and you can help them any time you want. But you will not always have me" (Mark 14:7 and parallels).

These issues can't be resolved for modern Christians by biblical interpretation.  The Bible (leaving aside the absurdity of referring to the Bible as it were a person with a single point of view, but that's the convention) has no objection to slavery, the subjugation of women, the devaluation of homosexuality, and so on.  That doesn't mean modern Christians must agree with all of the Bible; no Christians ever have.  The problem, once again, is not "literalism" but inerrancy.  Liberal, even radical Christians still can't seem to shake the assumption that the Bible, properly understood, has all the answers.  This leaves them closer in principle to fundamentalists than either faction wants to think.  Some Christian thinkers, like Nineham, James Barr and others, tried to move away from inerrancy, but most Christians continue to try to fine-tune it.

What Happens When You Assume

I've been wasting time poking around the Intertoobz lately when I should be writing here, but occasionally it pays off.  There was a post at The Atlantic the other day about an ancient cuneiform tablet inscribed with a version of the Deluge myth, in which a Mesopotamian god gives instructions for building a boat to save a few humans and representative animals from the coming flood.  The hook for the article was that the boat would be round, a coracle.  "Coracles were used in ancient Iraq as river taxies. They were, given their construction materials, light to transport. Their shape gave them stability against shifting currents and, when necessary, floodwaters."  So, not all that surprising, but still a nice light piece with some intriguing information.

The comments to the post largely focused on the relation between the biblical version of the Deluge myth, starring Noah, and other ancient versions.  Some commenters objected to the story using the story of Noah as clickbait, "which obscures how interesting the discovery is on its own merits. It shouldn't need to be tied to the Bible to make it interesting."  I quibbled mildly: 

I agree with you, but it seems unlikely to me that anyone in the modern West (even atheists like me) could hear about this story without thinking of its similarity to the Noah's ark story. That's not necessarily a bad thing. And there's a lot of lore about the history of religion floating around the atheist communities which is just as received and half-understood as anything you find in evangelical Christian circles. (I'm currently reading Bart Ehrman's Did Jesus Exist?, so that's on my mind at the moment.)

This morning I found that someone else had answered me:

DUNCAN!! I've got something for you. go to Amazon.com get into the books ask for "The Case for Christ; a journalists personal investigation for the evidence for Jesus " by Lee Strobel. There's the 'Look Inside' feature....you can only look at the cover and the beginning. click on beginning and scroll down to 'FROM DIXON TO JESUS' start reading there. AND, look up "More Than a Carpenter" by Josh McDowell. I mean, really. If you're not going to believe, you ought to know what you're not believing! Nez pah?

I found that this same person had posted several other comments on the same post, writing from a fundamentalist, inerrant-Bible viewpoint that has become familiar to me over to the years from reading and from interaction with people who hold it.  It fits with the books the person recommended to me, and with the assumptions about me they evidently made.

In fact I already have a copy of Lee Strobel's The Case for Christ, because other fundamentalists recommended it to me.  I've leafed through it and it appears to be basically the same fundamentalist apologetics that I've encountered before -- in Josh McDowell's More than a Carpenter, for example, which I read about thirty years ago when I was studying up on the subject.  McDowell was, with C. S. Lewis, the go-to guy for a lot of campus evangelicals in those days, best known for a book called Evidence That Demands a Verdict, originally published in the 1970s but reissued and "updated" several times since then.  Every time an evangelical would engage me in conversation to try to win me for Christ and discover that I knew a lot more about the Bible than they did, they'd tell me I should look at McDowell's Evidence, which, they said, answered a lot of the points I raised.  This was one reason I set out to write an anti-apologia in the 1980s, so that unbelievers faced with Christian misisonaries could simply say to them, "Have you heard of Duncan Mitchel's book Like Father, Like Son?  It answers a lot of the points you've raised."

Evidence That Demands a Verdict is not a book so much as a data dump of debater's notes, arranged topically as an outline.  Much of the material is testimonials from numerous people to the excellence and credibility of the Bible, the perfection and authority of Jesus, and the like.  Most of these testimonials are irrelevant, but even more notable, they are mostly from Christian thinkers of the 1800s and earlier.  A great deal has been learned about the Bible and its background in the ancient world that was unavailable to scholars and theologians two or three centuries ago, and even when McDowell includes twentieth-century archaeological and historical material, it's often outdated or misquoted.  But McDowell, like most apologists, relies on his audiences (whether they're Christian or not) being even less knowledgeable than he is.

McDowell is an evangelist and motivational speaker who travels to many college campuses for Campus Crusade for Christ, so I once had a chance to ask him a question when he appeared at IU.  I asked him about one of the factual errors in Evidence That Demands a Verdict, and (obviously flustered) he replied that he'd dealt with that in More Evidence That Demands a Verdict.  So I tracked that down and found that he hadn't dealt with it.  I wrote to him and told him so, and he wrote back saying, not altogether unreasonably, that a man can't remember everything he's written and thanks for writing.  When I checked later editions of Evidence in the late 1990s, the same misinformation was still in it.

More Than a Carpenter, originally published in 1977, really is a book, a relatively short argument for the divinity of Jesus.  As I say, I read it thirty years ago and don't remember any details about it; maybe I should reread it and do a blog post about it, since evidently it's still being recommended.  What I do remember is that it was standard popular fundamentalist Christian apologetic, and since McDowell is not a particularly reliable source anyway, it didn't require a lot of attention from me.  (By "popular" I mean to imply that there are more scholarly apologetics out there, such as the work of the late F. F. Bruce, whose The New Testament Documents -- Are They Reliable? was first published in 1943 but is still in print seventy years later.  It's better than More Than a Carpenter, but it still rests on some of the same untenable arguments used by McDowell.)

I don't know what assumptions my interlocutor at The Atlantic made about the fact that I'm currently reading Bart Ehrman's Did Jesus Exist?  She or he couldn't have known that I've read not only More Than a Carpenter but quite a lot of Christian apologetics, plus a shitload of scholarly and popular writing on Christianity from a wide spectrum of theological positions.  I'm reading Did Jesus Exist? not because I expect to learn much from it (and so far, about halfway through, I haven't: the material Ehrman is covering is mostly familiar to me) but to see where the debate on the existence of a historical Jesus stands nowadays.  I've encountered the Jesus-myth position before, mainly in G. A. Wells's The Jesus of the Early Christians (Pemberton, 1971), and found it intriguing but not convincing, nor do I think it's all that important.  Some of the "mythicists," as they call themselves, make some good arguments, but they also make some really flagrant mistakes.  It would be interesting if someone could prove that Jesus was a purely fictional person (as opposed to the legend-embroidered person depicted in the New Testament): it would eliminate the problem of distinguishing fact from fiction in the gospels.  But so far no one has, and given the difficulty of proving a negative no one is likely to; and I find it annoying when some of my fellow atheists declare dogmatically that Jesus demonstrably and certainly didn't exist, with no more basis than fundamentalists have for declaring dogmatically that Jesus demonstrably and certainly was the Christ, the Son of God.

Did You Know There Was, Like, an Adoration Chapel Around the Corner There?

There's a strange new article at the AV Club this weekend. Well, it's really strange because it's at the AV Club, whose writers generally show more sense.

Writer Allison Willmore begins "What If They Just Plain Believe?" by describing the reception of Kevin Smith's "religion-baiting" new movie Red State at Sundance earlier this year. Red State, however, "was just one of a crowd of films there to feature broad villainy in the name of fundamentalist or evangelical Christianity", and Willmore lists a few. Then she writes,

It’s not as though someone decided, “This will be the year of the abusive evangelical!” But taken together, these titles were enough to make some—to make me, certainly—squirm in discomfort at the easy targets they set up and then knock down. They invite the question: Are indie films unfair to Christianity?

Whoa! That's a bit of a leap, to put it gently: from "fundamentalist or evangelical Christianity" to "Christianity," full stop. It's the kind of equivocation that evangelicals themselves love to use in debate. When they're on the defensive, they remind you (as Willmore does) that "around 75 percent of Americans [identify] themselves as part of a Christian denomination." When they're on the offensive, they attack most of the 75 percent for not really being Christians, because they aren't evangelicals. And that intellectually dishonest move drags down Willmore's article, culminating in

If faith only shows up as a means of keeping people down or as a way for someone to hide an underlying cruel/greedy/lying/delusional nature, if the idea that a character can be sincere in his or her beliefs and get something from them is impossible, then indie film becomes the equivalent of the smug belligerent atheist kid on campus who’s always trying to organize debates about the existence of God with Christian groups, and who ends up coming across as just as annoying as any sanctimonious proselytizer. Personally, my hopes are pinned to the recently announced The Book Of Mormon adaptation: Trey Parker and Matt Stone may be experts at skewering the preposterous aspects of organized religion, but they’re also willing to admit that out of faith can come positive things.

(N.B. I added the link to the cartoon there.) Personally, I think that Parker and Stone are a good example of what is really wrong with most outsiders' view of conservative religion. They fasten, no less than Smith apparently did in Red State, on easy targets: homophobic fundamentalists, child-molesting Catholic priests. Then they turn around and sentimentalize clean-cut, wholesome Mormons (you know, the kind of people who worked hard for Proposition 8) or gesture vaguely at Jesus and Love and why-can't-we-all-get-along. Even hard-core atheists can go along with this, quoting with approval Gandhi's "I like your Christ, I do not like your Christians" line, and asking why fundamentalists are so un-Christian, unlike that nice Mr. Jesus, who only taught hellfire and damnation and plucking out your eye to avoid sin, and depart from me ye cursed into everlasting fire -- Die! Die! Die! You know, the true meaning of Christian love.

Willmore also complains:

So one could argue that films like the ones listed above are critiques of the dominant culture—though not the dominant culture of cinema, given that most multiplex movies, the ones that are seen by the broadest audiences, avoid religion entirely unless it’s of the ancient Greek or Norse variety and will enable some kickass slow-motion fight scenes. And it’s hard to imagine any other religion, even Islam, taking it on the chin so regularly in the media, being used as shorthand for hypocrisy and repressed rage without provoking protests of cultural insensitivity.

This is also a common complaint among conservative Christians, and just as dishonest when they do it. The trouble is partly that evangelical Christians want a very specific kind of Christianity depicted in media, and so they're dissatisfied by the watered-down version that makes it into product aimed at "the broadest audiences." I don't believe media people when they claim that they are just giving America what it wants, but they might be right that even most American Christians are put off by a movie character taking time out to a commercial for evangelical Christianity. (For a detailed, informed, and sympathetic discussion of this issue, I recommend Heather Hendershot's excellent Shaking the World for Jesus: Media and Conservative Evangelical Culture [Chicago, 2004].) And that leaves aside the detail that "the broadest audiences" Hollywood wants to reach are more than ever international audiences, who might not be Christian at all, but when they are, are even less likely to be American-style fundamentalists.

But even in the multiplexes, the story is more complicated than Willmore admits. Surely she's heard of this recent hit The Blind Side, which starred Sandra Bullock as a very Christian Southern white lady who adopts a poor black kid and makes him a football star. I haven't seen it and don't watch much multiplex fare anyway, but what I have seen over the past few decades fits the pattern I mentioned above: it does depict religious bigots as villains, but pays nonsectarian lip service to Christian charity and niceness. This understandably bothers a lot of conservative Christians, and I can understand why they want antigay bigots, racists, and anti-choice fanatics to be presented as positive characters, but the fact remains that such figures are embarrassments in real life and not representative of "the dominant culture." Many conservative Christians want commercial entertainment (borrowing Willmore's words) "to run with [fundamentalism] as the primary characterization of the religious affiliation of the majority of the nation", but only as long as it's presented positively.

To repeat: fundamentalists are not equivalent to Christianity. As I've said before, no single type of Christian is representative of Christianity. It's as invalid to judge Christianity by Martin Luther King Jr. as it is to judge it by Pat Robertson. I judge it by Jesus as he's depicted in the canonical gospels, so of course it comes up wanting. Even people who might privately share such views don't like what they look like from outside, so of course they blame the messenger. (I see a similarity here to men who complain about negative depictions of men as violent brutes in commercial media: they don't object to depictions of violent men per se -- quite the opposite -- but they do mind violent men being seen as villains. Men who aren't violent, who like women, children, and domesticity -- these are the men they want to see demonized.)

Using "abusive" Christians as negative characters isn't limited to non-Christians, by the way, or even to today's commercial entertainment. Such types show up in nineteenth-century popular fiction; I believe there were such characters in Oliver Twist, and the fanatic has always been a convenient boogeyman for those who want to look and feel moderate. (The worst thing about Fred Phelps and his Westboro Baptist Church, to my mind, is that they make almost any other Christian seem moderate by comparison, and many bigots take advantage of this.) I wonder if The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, which actually is an anti-Christian book, could be published today. Twain, however, fit the pattern I described above: "If Christ were here now there is one thing he would not be – a Christian," he once wrote.

A number of commenters named films that treat Christianity, or religion generally, with more nuance and sympathy; I could name more myself. But that would bog one down in disputes about how adequate they are, or if there are enough of them. That's not really the issue anyway; I think it's more important that Willmore relied on this convenient confusion between one strand of Christianity and the whole tangled skein. This is why I was startled to find Willmore's polemic at the AV Club; it really belongs on a hardcore conservative Christian site.

Heaven for Me, But Not for Thee

I don't get it:

If there is one thing many fundamentalist Christians are known for, it is their blatant hypocrisy. I have heard liberal Christians and even some moderates say that they believe virtually everyone will go to some sort of heaven as long as they are not terrible people who commit serious crimes.

Not so for the fundamentalists. For them, the only path to heaven is through Jesus. Like the woman in the cartoon, they are quick to condemn all other religions as false while generally refusing to critically examine their own.

This makes no sense at all, because it mixes two different complaints together incoherently. First there's the claim that fundamentalists, but not liberals, condemn the beliefs of others "while generally refusing to critically examine their own." I don't agree -- in my experience and observation, liberal and moderate Christians just draw the line in a different place than fundamentalists do. David Fergusson, for example, dislikes fundamentalists as much as Atheist Revolution does, but he sees "faith" as a phenomenon beyond question, and chides militant atheists for being so harsh and negative and disrespectful. Even among fundamentalists there are degrees of strictness; at my job I used to overhear ladies from the Church of the Nazarene saying complacently that they weren't as strict as the "Pentycosts." And it was true: Nazarenes' hemlines were an inch or two shorter than Pentecostals', they were allowed to cut their hair, they could have a TV in the house to watch Christian broadcasting. Anything more would be going too far.

The second complaint is that fundamentalists are so extreme: liberals and moderates will let almost anybody into heaven, but fundamentalists require proper credentials. There's nothing hypocritical about this. The real trouble is that nobody knows what the criteria for heaven are. Maybe the liberals are right, maybe the fundamentalists are, maybe they're all wrong, but it's not up to them to decide. If heaven and hell existed, then it would be important to know just what the entrance requirements are, not to brush the question aside with platitudes. It won't be settled by halving the difference between the extremes and sitting down in the middle.

It would also, according to the principle of critical examination, be appropriate to ask whether it can be right or just to condemn anybody, no matter how terrible his or her crimes, to eternal punishment. How many people are you allowed to kill before you deserve Hell? How much pork can you eat, how many illicit sexual partners are you allowed, how short a skirt can you wear, how many lies can you tell? Can you be a 'terrible person' in your heart even if you don't commit any serious crimes, so that being terrible is by itself enough to consign you to the flames that are not quenched? What end is served by eternal torture anyway? This is not a trivial question in a country where literal torture is used by my government to "defend" me. It works in both directions: if some people deserve to be tortured forever in the afterlife for being "terrible," then a little waterboarding and electroshock in this life is not a big deal by comparison; if there are people who deserve to be tortured (and some prominent atheists are not willing to condemn the practice absolutely), then belief in eternal damnation is not an evil belief even if, in fact, Hell doesn't exist.

Maybe the idea is that I'm supposed to feel grateful when a liberal Christian allows that I'm a good person in her eyes, so I won't go to hell? No doubt their tolerance speaks well for them, but I'm an atheist, so hell is rather low on my list of worries. I don't see them as a different breed than fundamentalists; they remind me of the Cossacks who, because they respected Leon Trotsky, denied that he was a Jew: "He's one of us!" Being assured that I am so fit to eat with the hogs does not win me over. I've noticed that a lot of people enjoy working themselves into a snit because some Bad Christian believes that they will go to hell. Not, it seems, because they think that nobody should go to hell, but because they think that they shouldn't. (Not me! Julia!) And those who say they like Christ but not Christians need to explain why Jesus, who according the gospels was pretty free with threats of damnation, is preferable to a fundamentalist in this respect.

One important question is being begged here too: the Atheist Revolutionist seems to assume that atheists, or maybe most atheists, are people who stopped believing in gods because they subjected their beliefs to critical examination, and they continue to do so. Not from what I see. We atheists have our own traditions, our exalted if not sacred writers and scriptures, which, especially on first encounter, we tend to take on trust (which is one of the meanings of "faith"). That's why so many bad arguments and misinformation circulate in atheist writings and oral lore. The advent of soundbyte atheism is not, in this light, a positive development as far as I'm concerned.

In his 1958 Critique of Religion and Philosophy (Harper & Brothers), Walter Kaufmann wrote a dialogue between Satan and a Christian, which concluded (chapter 59):

Christian: You always harp on hell.

Satan: There is no place like home. And you might as well get used to the idea: haven't you been told that I enjoy the company of those who cannot answer me any better than you?

Christian: But I don't understand at all. Only hysterics think of going to hell themselves.

Satan: I know: good Christians consider hell a place for others. But don't you realize that if you are right about everything, you, and those like you, are undoubtedly headed for hell? Don't you see how immeasurably you stand to gain if Christianity is untenable? It is I that bring you glad tidings. Believe me and you are saved. That God exists, that is a ritual phrase, charged with emotion and a thousand connotations: some sheer superstition, some myths, some true, some false, and most of them vague. But here is the truth that shall make you free: I do not exist.

Christian: If Satan does not exist, I must have dreamed. So I can go on believing what I have always believed. But what exactly do I believe? That is the question.

See you in Hell, folks!

The Great Churn of Being

I was going to write about faith, especially about David Fergusson's Faith and Its Critics: A Conversation (Oxford, 2009), but my mind is still chewing its cud, as it were, over what I want to say. Besides, reading Fergusson sent me back to the great scholar James Barr's 1977 book Fundamentalism (Westminster Press), which had a great influence on me when I first read it in the early 1980s. For one thing, I'm pretty sure it was from Barr that I learned (or realized) that fundamentalists do not read the Bible literally. Fundamentalism is a big book, 340-odd pages of smallish type plus endnotes and bibliography, but for me it is fascinating, fun to read, and endlessly quotable. Here are some samples from the last chapter. Some of what he wrote is dated, but all too much of it is still relevant, more than thirty years later.

It is often argued by theologians that modern man cannot understand Christianity except where it is re-expressed in a form that takes account of the modern tendencies of modern thought. Fundamentalism shows clearly that this is not so. On the contrary, it is perfectly possible to form a version of Christianity which rejects or ignores large areas of modern thought and knowledge, but which works reasonably well for large numbers of people and is also reasonably stable. The decision between the two options is not at all a matter of inevitability: rather, it is a choice [314].

Barr also dismissed the idea, still popular among some of the New Atheists, that

one cannot listen to the radio or use the telephone and at the same time believe in miracles like Balaam's ass or the journey of Jonah in the belly of the whale[. It] is quite erroneous; thousands of people combine both of these things without the slightest difficulty [314].

I'd say, though Barr didn't, that this is the flip side of the reactionary Christian claim that atheists with moral values are unfairly and dishonestly piggybacking on religion.

This next passage has some bearing on the Atheist Bus campaign:

People say, for instance, that fundamentalism depends basically upon an attitude of fear, a sense of insecurity that demands something absolute and infallible to hold on to. This is said not only by critics of fundamentalism, but also by highly conservative people. … But, whether this is so or not, the position in this book does not depend upon it. I do not doubt that fundamentalism can be a reaction of fear, and that resistance to change can follow from fear of change. But I do not think that this is necessarily the case, and I do not see why fundamentalist convictions should not be found allied with a courageous and cheerful psychological constitution. The emphasis in this book falls not on the psychological states, but on the logical and methodological perceptions which go to form fundamentalism. This is surely a better approach, if only because it has a chance of doing some good; little is achieved by saying that such and such a religious trend is motivated by fear, except to irritate those concerned; the psychological argument is often paralyzing and useless. It is my opinion that fundamentalism can and often does go with a quite stable and balanced personality, and this fits with the point I have already made about the stability of fundamentalist ideology. I do think that fundamentalism is a pathological condition of Christianity; but that does not mean that it is psychologically pathological ... [317-18]

This immediately leads us to state a further reason why I have not in this book developed the ‘psychological’ sort of criticisms often made against fundamentalism: in so far as these criticisms are valid, they have to be levelled not only against fundamentalists but also against many other currents within Christianity. The idea that religious behaviour is motivated through fear rather than love or faith is one that could be quite broadly spread, as a criticism of the most diverse Christian traditions; the accusation of individualism has also been made on all sides; and as for pathological attitudes about sex and other matters of life-style, the less said anywhere in Christianity the better. In so far as these are difficulties for fundamentalism, they are difficulties that it shares with a variety of currents, especially minority currents and extreme currents, within diverse segments of Christianity [331-32].

On "extremism":

As with some other comparable social movements, there is always a position more extreme than the one you are talking with at any particular moment. A person whom an average mainstream Christian will regard as a rabid fundamentalist will often be found to consider himself rather moderate; beyond him there lie, it appears, whole tracts of belief that are much more intransigent and uncompromising. The fundamentalist polemicist thus puzzles people by assuming a pose of moderation. He affects to suppose, at least at times, that his is in fact a central position within Christianity. One the one side you have the severe distortions of Roman Catholicism, on the other you have the utter perversions of liberalism, and in the middle you have the sound, central and moderate position of his own conservative evangelicalism. There may indeed be persons who push the conservative evangelical position to unnecessary extremes, it is admitted, but the average sound conservative (i.e., the one you are talking to at the moment) occupies middle ground. It is thus not uncommon to find a person who holds absolutely all the tenets of fundamentalist belief, … but who nevertheless uses the term ‘fundamentalist’ not for himself but for some shadowy group of people who hold a yet more extreme position.

On human sexuality. This part probably will seem the most problematic to people who are concerned with contemporary anti-gay crusades by conservative Christians, or with abusive neo-patriarchal sects within fundamentalism. Even so, from my own observations (and books such as Heather Hendershot's excellent Shaking the World for Jesus: Media and Conservative Evangelical Culture [Chicago, 2004]), I'd say that Barr is still basically right:

In the matter of sexual relationships, the literature of central conservative groups gives little basis for the idea of a pathological prurience. My own criticism would be the opposite, that the material is childishly naïve in a pre-1914 schoolboy-idealistic manner, culminating perhaps in the immortal piece of advice, “To share a common interest in Sunday School work is not, in itself, a decisive indicator that you should get married.” This was published in 1964! At least as far as one can nudge from the published literature, the conservative evangelical view of sex and marriage, far from being haunted by sin and guilt, is light and superficial. What the conservative student gets from his reading matter is advice of a prudential kind about the unwisdom of playing with other people’s affections, holding hands unless one is serious, kissing before becoming engaged and, most of all, getting married hastily on the basis of a common devotion to the work of the Lord. All these are indeed not matters without any importance: but as an ethical implication of the (supposedly earth-shaking) gospel they are just laughably negligible in comparison with the perception of ethical issues in theologians in mainstream theology. I suspect that relations between men and women in fundamentalist groups are commonly quite happy and wholesome, but for this no thanks are due to the mediocre guidance on ethical questions handed out by the group. More can be ascribed to the common sense of purpose and neglect of self in common devotion to the work of the Lord [331].

The gay-marriage movement, I suspect, is partially driven by similar attitudes to human sexuality by younger GLBT Christians.

Finally, on quasi-fundamentalism among mainstream Christians:

The point is that many people in the church, though rejecting fundamentalism, continue to treat some biblical passages, or some sections of the Bible, in a manner that seems to be close to the fundamentalist understanding. This is quite a serious matter. People do not think, with fundamentalism, that everything is accurate, and they consider some passages, perhaps in the Old Testament, to have no value for the church today or otherwise not to be the Word of God; but when they come to the passages that are important for them they use them as if they were a direct transcript of the actual words of Jesus, or as if they were in the fullest sense the Word of God. Is there not therefore something that might be called a selective fundamentalism in the mind of moderate Christians? … It is quite doubtful, however, whether the cachet “selective fundamentalism” is deserved. … Nevertheless there is some cause for disquiet about this phenomenon [333-34].

Compare, for example, some of my posts on gay Christians and their use of the Bible.

It may seem odd -- it does to me, a little -- for me to be talking so favorably about a Christian writer, an elderly heterosexual one at that. (He died just a couple of years ago, and I very much regret that I never wrote to him to thank him for his work.) I should stress that Barr was on his own account conservative theologically, and I don't claim or believe that he would approve of my positions on these issues.

But he was also an enthusiastic controversialist. His first book, The Semantics of Biblical Language (Oxford, 1961), threw down the gauntlet against the apologetic use of the dictionary by mainstream biblical scholars, and he often returned to the theme, as in Biblical Words for Time (SCM, 1969). Several of his books, like Beyond Fundamentalism (Westminster, 1984) and The Bible in the Modern World (SCM, 1973), were intended for a general audience. The Times obituary says that "For one who was so critical and sharp with his pen he was strangely reluctant to engage in serious oral debate and discussion, either on the details of his own work or on matters of academic concern in general," but according to the Independent, "When Barr debated the matter [of fundamentalism] openly with his opponents one evening in Oxford at All Saints' Church, not surprisingly the meeting was well attended." And do I need to tell you how gratified I was to read this footnote (page 51, note 17) in Barr's Gifford Lectures, Biblical Faith and Natural Theology (Clarendon Press, 1993)?

It seems necessary to say this, if only to notice and to counter the suggestions of John Boswell, Christianity, Social Tolerance and Homosexuality (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1980), who thinks, for example, that St Paul 'never suggested that there was any historical or legal reason to oppose homosexual behaviour: if he did object to it, it was purely on the basis of functional, contemporary moral standards' (p. 106) -- especially since his work includes some discussion of Paul's use of 'nature' in our passage. Interesting as his work is in its gathering of material from the later history, in its handling of biblical texts and above all in its arguments from specific biblical words I can only say that I find it to be staggering in the degree of its misjudgment.

(The full text of the lectures is available online.)

I'd had a good many doubts about Boswell's discussion of the biblical material in Christianity, Social Tolerance, and Homosexuality, but lacking all Greek and Hebrew I couldn't confirm them, so it was very gratifying to find that an expert like Barr felt the same way I did. For the same reason I was also pleased to find that Barr's discussion of the anti-homosexual passage Romans 1:26-28 agreed at key points with the conclusions I'd already reached on my own. And as far as I can tell from Biblical Faith and Natural Theology, Barr's criticism of Boswell was not based on homophobia, as so many conservative scholars' critiques were. That's notable and impressive for a conservative Christian of Barr's generation.

According to another obituary, "it is typical of him that to the very end he was looking for new projects. Left on his desk was the beginning of a major work about prophecy." I wish he could have finished it; Barr was one of those writers whose ideas and opinions I'm always interested to read.