Left behind

Returning to my office once again, I'm overwhelmed by the number of books I haven't read or thought about in years and years. We don't recognize each other! So it seems like a good time to winnow. For my first purge, I chose the suite of rapture-ready Left Behind books I used for a course on "Cultures of the Religious Right" in 2005 and 2008. (Some students still remember how teams took us through all ten sensationalistic volumes.) Will there come a time I wish I had kept them? I doubt it - though there are arguably not fewer folks today whose reality is congruent with Left Behind's amalgam of Book of Revelation and thriller fiction. Not fun anymore.

Srsly?

Watched - perhaps for the fifth time - the Coen Brothers' film "A Serious Man." But today was a little different: I was seeing it on the big screen for the first time (Film Forum). I'd read the script - first time I've read a film script, actually. And I went with my film-buff friend L, so we spent as long after the film discussing its every twist and turn as we did in the movie theater watching it! The occasion is, of course, my ULEC, whose first assigned work is precisely "A Serious Man" (though my lecture will be about other things). When the movie came out, it was "obvious" to many viewers that it was an updating of the Book of Job - though the film directors coyly denied any such intention. The interview posted on the website of their co-producer Working Title includes this:

Is A Serious Man based on a novel [sic!], i.e. The Book of Job? 

Ethan: That’s funny, we hadn’t thought of it in that way. That does have the tornado, like we do, but we weren’t thinking of that. 

Joel: Like when we were doing O Brother [Where Art Thou], we weren’t thinking that was sort of like the Odyssey story, but we did become a little self-conscious that it was about a man returning home, and we wondered whether to make it more classical. But with this film, we weren’t thinking this was like the Book of Job. We were just making our movie. We understand the reference, but it wasn’t in our minds.

I think it was in their minds, if not entirely consciously. In any case, viewers of every religious stripe have seen it as unquestionably a Job movie... which is actually only more interesting if they really truly weren't thinking of it. Many of these viewers see parallels, like that Job has three friends and Larry Gopnik meets three rabbis, or that the film ends with a tornado, which reminds viewers of God speaking from a whirlwind near the end of the Book of Job. But those are superficial: the tornado at the end of the film recalls the start of Job, when his children are killed by a great wind destroying the house in which they were feasting. I'm not sure how I'm going to present all this on Wednesday. Part of the experiment of the class is having them watch "A Serious Man" before reading the Book of Job itself. If they single out the things in the film which I think belong to the Joban template, wouldn't that be cool!

Test yourself

For the last meeting of Cultures of the Religious Right I invited students to submit questions for a final quiz (otherwise I'd come up with questions of my own). We ended up with a quiz which, if not always seriously, touches on virtually everything we've read and discussed. Here are some of the questions.

1. What is the "Social Gospel," as it was understood in the late 19th and early 20th centuries?
A) Christians should engage in society functions for the chance to evangelize over hors d'oeuvres
B) Christians must engage in social work as Jesus was primarily a teacher of ethics
C) Christians must engage in social work because the Second Coming will only occur after the human race has rid itself of social evils through its own effort
D) Christianity should be spread by community sing-alongs

7. Methodism had roots in what movement on the European continent:
A) Pietism
B) the Jesuits
C) the Holiness movement
D) The English Act of Supremacy

10. Dispensational premillenialism asserts that:
A) The millennium precedes the Second Coming
B) The Second Coming precedes the millennium
C) The millennium is dispensed seven times
D) The Second Coming takes the place of the millennium.

12. Why was Jerry Falwell criticized by other fundamentalist leaders when he sought accreditation for Liberty Bible College?
A) They disagreed with the understanding of Christian ethics taught at the college
B) They were angered by Falwell's move into the secular mainstream out of his former separatism
C) They were angered that Liberty Bible College had founded a museum on evolution
D) The credit belongs to God alone.

16. The Scopes Trial of 1925 in Tennessee was brought upon by what "immediate issue":
A) Disgruntled student John Scopes was upset that his biology teacher's curriculum included no mention of God or Genesis.
B) Substitute biology teacher John Scopes taught evolution to his class even though it was illegal at the time.
C) Biology teacher John Scopes was discovered to be having same-sex relations with a fellow teacher.
D) The will of celebrity John Scopes left the vaudeville star’s entire estate to his monkey, Darwin.

20. The "wall of separation" between church and state appears:
A) in the Bible
B) in the Constitution
C) in the Bill of Rights
D) none of these

25. Who criticized what in these terms: "a God without wrath brought men without sin into a kingdom without judgment through the ministrations of a Christ without a cross"?
A) Martin Luther—the Counterreformation
B) H. Richard Niebuhr—liberal Protestantism
C) Reinhold Niebuhr—fundamentalism
D) Mark Driscoll—the emerging church

26. The parable of the good Samaritan answers the question:
A) Who is the chosen of God?
B) What do I owe strangers?
C) How do I inherit eternal life?
D) Who is my neighbor?

(Answers: 1C, 7A, 10B, 12B, 16C, 20D, 25B, 26D)

Um, urgent?

In Cultures of the Religious Right today, we discussed a 2003 manual for pastors by Dan Kimball called The Emerging Church: Vintage Christianity for New Generations. Kimball's church in Santa Cruz has reached out to young people curious about spirituality but indifferent to religion by using knowingly "retro" setups like acoustic instruments and an atmosphere more like a coffee shop than the TV show-like spectacles of megachurches like Rick Warren's Saddleback, let alone a traditional church.

Kimball claims that the generation of people in their teens and twenties now are different from any generation in the past, and that none of the forms of Christianity which worked for their predecessor generations will work for these. In particular, the strategies the likes of Warren used to reach "seekers" (people alienated by the churches they were forced to attend as children, but seeking a "purpose" for their lives) - deemphasizing religious symbols and rituals - don't work with this new generation, which thirsts for the real thing: crosses, candles, even (maybe) theology. Being "postmodern," however, they won't put up with dogmatic authority claims. The church must reach out to these people, or it's doomed to die.

Kimball's "emerging church" way to them is through "vintage Christianity," the re-presentation of traditional symbols but newly interpreted - and emphasizing the multiplicity of possible interpretations. It's like "vintage clothing," my student T insightfully pointed out, which might be used clothes or might be newly made but roughed up to look worn (indeed you'd kind of prefer it to be the latter, but not sure). Kimball provides pointers for generating spaces appealing to these "post-seeker" generations, and I decided to try to remake our classroom along those lines. I closed the shades, and put little candles all over. I moved the chairs out of rows and circles and made random-seeming clusters. I put on some Christian music. But the coup de grâce was on the screen where we project films and stuff from the internet. Kimball (p. 185) had contrasted

MODERN CHURCH (Seeker-Sensitive)
Stained glass taken out and replaced with video screens

EMERGING CHURCH (Post-Seeker-Sensitive)
Stained glass brought back in on video screens

so the washed-out image of one of the rose windows of Notre Dame in Paris (above), copied off the internet, grainy and clearly untrue to the colors of the original, shone a bluish light over the proceedings. It was pretty cool. But were lives changed? I don't think so. My students may be post-post-seeker, or rather, seeking a way to be over the whole post thing (which doesn't necessarily make the analyses of the emergent church less relevant). But there was a slightly different energy to the room...

Jesus like you've never heard him

The best thing about teaching is that you learn so much from your students. Two of the students in Cultures of the Religious Right are doing research on Christian music, which exists in every genre you can imagine. Here's the metalcore band Norma Jean. (Not for the faint of heart!)
The words:
Staring at the world through the hole you put in my hand.
That was caused by a blade you gently inserted.
I did this for you, not for your religion, not for your patterns
I did this for you. I did this for a man like you.
Stop searching and find Me.
I am stabbed by grace and slinging blood.

A far cry from pastel portraits of Jesus with sheep and children!

Religion/Sexuality

In Cultures of the Religious Right, we've begun reading Tanya Erzen's recent book, Straight to Jesus: Sexual and Religious Conversions in the Ex-Gay Movement. Ethnographer Erzen spent eighteen months at New Hope, the country's oldest ex-gay program (in San Rafael, CA). Her book is the first secular study which presents the men (and a few women) who come to ex-gay ministries in a sympathetic way.

Not an easy topic to discuss! Erzen does a good but not great job. Good, because she has humanized a population generally vilified by nearly everyone. But not great, because she doesn't really go that deep. The men (and a few women) who spend a year or more at a place like New Hope are suffering from a kind of divided self (to use a term from William James I've been using in the class), a self so divided it might better be called tortured. Erzen doesn't capture the torture because she doesn't really get the religious part - if only these guys knew that homosexuality isn't mentioned in the Bible, she implies, if only they knew that the few passages taken to be about it can be read differently! If only it were that simple. She doesn't really get the sexual part, either - the experience of your own desire as anarchic, meaningless, destructive.

I took the occasion to unveil my new view of religious studies as the discipline that reminds us there is no consensus on the real (which you saw emerge at AAR last November, at which point I mentioned questions like: is there life after death, do animals have souls, is there purpose in the universe, does the devil exist?). No other discipline really does this. It also requires that we find ways of writing which don't take sides. This may not be possible, ultimately, but it is certainly virtuous to try! Sexuality is a perfect (if very difficult) test case for thinking of the non-consensus on the real - way more demanding than maintaining a studied agnosticism about the existence of a distant God, or an afterlife, or other things which aren't right here right now. Erzen doesn't really make it, since she makes clear throughout that she accepts modern secular views of sexuality.

To show what Erzen doesn't consider, I found myself giving an account of the sacred mystery of reproduction: nothing human beings do is as powerful or mysterious. That you can do other things with the organs designed for reproduction is uninteresting by comparison, and the difference between different kinds of misuse less significant than that between misuse and proper use, which is, I suggested, on the order of the difference between the finite and the infinite. I suppose that's a more Catholic than Evangelical view of sexuality, but I needed to make the point in the strongest terms - and besides: Evangelicals have been cribbing sexual ethics from Catholics at least since the mid 1970s. I didn't talk about sin, though. Oops.

I was surprised at how easy it was to rehearse this view. Is it the internalized Catholic upbringing? Maybe not (there wasn't that much of it, to be honest), or not just. The flip side of my religious studies persona, which enjoys the possibility of alternative realities, is the one which is slowly but steadily coming to terms with the fact that human beings live in perishable bodies of a particular design on particular parts of a particular planet, surrounded by the contingencies of evolution, history, language... While sexuality is a modern construct and understandings of gender vary culturally, it is a "brute fact of the universe" (as my friend Kevin Olson used to say), along with mortality, that some acts create new life. This is an astounding thing in some way qualitatively different from everything else human beings do. This isn't at heart a religious view, I don't think, but I can see how it might inspire or require religious elaboration like that I gave in class today. (This isn't to say that it's the only or even main source of normative heterosexuality, which is held in place by all the structures, habits and pleasures of patriarchal hierarchy.)

What would an account of New Hope look like which called in question not only the idea of a distinct homosexual identity (which Erzen thinks she's rejecting) but the very category of sexuality which sees procreative acts as no more than a subset, sometimes marvelous sometimes inconvenient? Now try not taking sides between that view and the contemporary liberal understandings and experiences of sexuality. Is it even possible? Could one describe even a single episode of desire? Wish us luck! We've two more classes to discuss Erzen but the methodological questions - and ethical one, too - will accompany us through the rest of the course.

God's cul-de-sac

In Cultures of the Religious Right today, we listened to a recording of a sermon of Rick Warren's on how to make wise choices. (I picked this CD up at the church three years ago; none were available at my recent visit.) I copied for students the worksheets with blanks to fill in, and all of us wrote down in our own handwriting that fear makes people sarcastic, shirk responsibility, stubborn and shortsighted, the need to get the facts, count the costs, plan your steps, announce your goal, step out in faith, do it in love, etc. I thought it brilliant to start with an attack on sarcasm ("it's insecure people's way of protecting their insecurity," he assured us), as this disables one kind of dismissive response to his deliberately prosaic preaching right from the outset. You're scoffing? This must threaten you somehow.

This was my fourth time to hear this sermon, and I was struck anew by its artful artlessness. It's not just that there is something for the audience to write down or circle every few minutes, just as one's attention starts to wander. Not just that it's full of earthy folk wisdom and friendly humor. It's that it can be heard at so many levels, from (1) an entry level where the message is entirely secular, the Biblical references merely a helpful set of metaphors, to (2) progressively more Biblical levels, where we realize that he's describing a "Biblical way of living" and not just a wise and successful one, and ending with (3) levels where miracles happen for the faithful, and hell awaits those who are too proud and presumptuous to pray. We'd just finished reading Susan Harding's analysis of the rhetoric of Jerry Falwell's ministry, The Book of Jerry Falwell: Fundamentalist Language and Politics, and it was illuminating to see how different Warren is from Falwell, but also how he uses some of the same tropes. (I was going to write that Falwell would never have posed for a photo in a pool, but Harding includes a picture of him going down a water slide, fully clothed, in the PTL theme park.) (I wonder what wit decided to turn the Warren picture upside down for it's not-quite-parody of the risen Christ.) (And what kind of pool is that exactly?)

One theme was crossing the Red Sea, which Warren amusingly paraphrased - in a manner immediately comprehensible to his exurban Orange County congregation - as "God's cul-de-sac." Trapped between the sea, cliffs and Pharaoh's approaching armies, God has Israel just where he wanted it, and when we face our own Red Seas, he has us just where he wants us, too. At this point, God wants us to take risks. If we take wise risks, and make a public declaration of our goals, God will help us achieve them - as he helped Warren achieve the aims of his ministry when he founded Saddleback a quarter century before and declared his intention to create a large community on its own large piece of land, or when he, more recently, called for 3000 hosts to have small group meetings in their houses and got more than 3200. "What is your own personal Red Sea right now," he asked genially?

This is a good example of something you could take in a number of different ways. "Red Sea" may be just another way of saying "tough choices you need to make," and it is probably true that in the face of such a choice making a declaration of your goals is a good idea. But of course the People of Israel didn't just say "we gotta go through it" and swim; God got them out of the cul-de-sac by having his agent, Moses, command the waters to part. They were saved by a miracle, and a courageous leader who disregarded their sarcasm, shirking, stubbornness and shortsightedness. So you can take a self-help message from Warren, or a quite different one: God works miracles, and you'd better accept that and expect them. And, if you're prone to scoff, you may need a strong leader. And what about the rest of the story? Do we need to ask ourselves who Pharaoh and his armies right now are, for whom God has planned a different Red Sea experience?

What's fascinated me from the start is the sliding scale in everything I've encountered at Saddleback. It's never all-or-nothing. You can start on the journey with an effortless baby step, or even find yourself already on the way: I thought it was just his good common sense advice I was seeking and following, but now I find that it's been something more for some time already. Like their "campus," which looks entirely secular - like a community college - until you look and notice a slender crucifix high above, and a baptismal pool tucked around a corner. The garden, full of fake rocks and fun trails for kids (see below; for more pictures), is in fact a prayer garden, with scenes - unmarked - of 40 Bible stories for you to discover, once you've read those stories, and once you know to look for them in the garden. I'm sure there's plenty more, and can imagine the pleasure of discovering successive layers of meaning.

For Warren-like preachers, that's the way to win back the unchurched for Jesus - incrementally, with no forced decisions, no embarrassing altar calls or public hand-waving, and none of the moralistic holier-than-thou posturing many associate with churches. For his critics, it seems like a way for people to go through the motions without ever actually making the decisive commitment: Warren never talks about sin or salvation, at least not explicitly. But I suspect that if you got deeper into his world, took the courses and joined a small group, you'd learn to hear that, too, at work in his sermons. (Is it not sin that makes us scoff?) He speaks in a kind of code the unsuspecting first-time-goer would never notice.

It's brilliant rhetoric, but also unnerving - you'll recall that I was spooked to find a book on spirit warfare, blurbed by Warren, in the bookshop at my last visit. I won't be sarcastic about it; it frightens me. I know where he's coming from, but I don't know where he's going.

Suffer the little children

In Cultures of the Religious Right today, after discussing Mark Noll's account of Luther - whom I paraphrased as "the anti-Obama: no we can't" - it was time for our weekly group work on a Bible passage. For a variety of reasons I picked Mark 10:1-27. It contains Jesus' strongest condemnation of divorce (what God hath joined together...) and of wealth (easier for a camel to go through the eye of the needle than for a rich man to enter the kingdom of God) as well as a happy scene with children (Suffer the little children to come unto me...), a reference to the earlier and generally neglected first account of the creation of Adam and Eve in Gen 1:27 (from the beginning of the creation God made them male and female), a digest of the decalogue, a proof text for the heresy of Arianism (there is none good but one, God), and, right after the camel and the eye of the needle, a no we can't passage:

And they were astonished out of measure, saying among themselves, Who then can be saved?
And Jesus looking upon them saith, With men it is impossible, but not with God: for with God all things are possible. (All quotations are from the King James Bible)

It's way too much to do all at once, but we don't have a lot of time and I wanted students to see that right-wing (sexual ethics) and left-wing (economic justice) Christian social issues appear back-to-back in scripture. And I was curious to see which of the many possible topics would catch their eye. To my surprise (less in retrospect), students didn't even pause to notice the divorce discussion - it's invisible as an issue in liberal 2008, and they weren't surprised (as I'd expected) to discover or rediscover the two accounts in Genesis; we'll return to divorce when gay marriage comes up in a few weeks, and the two accounts when I'm ready to assert that it is impossible to read the Bible literally, and anyone who says it can be done has never tried it. The condemnation of wealth seemed old hat to them, too, so I pointed out to them that the passage appears (also) to be saying that the salvation of the rich is not impossible for God, but the salvation of anyone - rich or poor - is impossible for human beings; I think I'm right to remember that this passage was used in Pope John Paul 2's condemnation of liberation theology. What did they focus on instead? To my sadness it was this:

And they brought young children to him, that he should touch them ...
And he took them up in his arms, put his hands upon them, and blessed them.

How the Catholic clergy scandals have poisoned the wells.

Christian histories of Christianity

In Cultures of the Religious Right, we're reading Mark Noll's Turning Points: Decisive Moments in the History of Christianity. This is a textbook for colleges and adult learning contexts used widely in Christian (meaning especially Evangelical) institutions; I first stumbled on it in the bookstore of the Moody Bible Institute in Chicago. Noll is a distinguished historian, long at Wheaton but now at Notre Dame, who is also an important gadfly Evangelical intellectual. Part of the interest of this book is the way he shows Evangelicals that the history of Christianity is worth knowing about (they tend to have what Martin Marty calls a "hop, skip and jump" view, starting with the New Testament and early Church, skipping to the Reformers, and then jumping to the present). Along the way, he presents an excellent overview of a very complicated history, and if he owns a "Protestant Evangelical" bias, he's scholarly enough to tell us and give us enough material (generally) to see alternatives to his interpretations.

This became clear today as we discussed Noll's chapter on the Council of Nicaea and the conversion of Constantine, which started and ended with discussion of political questions in 4th century Rome, discussing theology only in the middle. Nothing in his presentation excludes the view that Constantine's conversion may not have been sincere, that he was using the Christian church to pacify his empire, even as the bishops were using him to establish themselves while the theological stuff was epiphenomenal; indeed, he offers us the materials for such a view. When students in some consternation wondered "But isn't he supposed to be doing a Christian history of Christianity?" I responded, inspired: the most cynical and apparently anti-Christian account could be true and the religious view also true. Human beings are sinners, but God brings good out of evil. And indeed Noll gave notice in his introduction that this was one of the things the history of Christianity taught - that God looks out for his church and preserves it, despite the failings of human beings.

There is no more a single Christian way of doing the history of Christianity (or anything else) than there is a single secular way. It was interesting to discover in Noll the materials for what you might call a "total depravity" history of Christianity. The agents of history are sinners, impure of motive and probably deluded about their own virtue. Some are aware of this and penitent, but none is without sin, and so human history will inevitably be a history of vice and hypocrisy and overreaching, if also of penitence and whatever helps the repentant sin no more. How fortunate that sinful human beings aren't the only agents of human history!

Go figure

Had the first "Bible study" in the Cultures of the Religious Right class, something new and a bit tricky to do, not just because I'm not a Biblical scholar, but also because Bible Study is a devotional practice, and that kind of devotion has no place in a secular academic setting. But I felt that students needed experience with the Bible, and also want to test the hypothesis that a Bible study group is more like what we do in our seminar college than we might suppose - or at least, different for different reasons than we might think.

I decided a suitable first text was Luke 10:25-37, the Parable of the Good Samaritan. It's a story most people know, accessible and relatively straightforward, not to mention a part of common speech. At least one student didn't know this was the source of the phrase "good Samaritan"; in fact, many folks probably think the phrase redundant since the only Samaritans they've ever heard of are good ones! There were a few other points I was hoping to make, such as what a parable is (and isn't), and that the summary of the law which precedes this one ("'Love the Lord your God with all your heart and with all your soul and with all your strength and with all your mind'; and, 'Love your neighbor as yourself.'") consists of quotations not from Jesus but from the Hebrew Bible. I was also going to mention - though it has nothing to do with the evangelical religious cultures this course explores - figurative/allegorical readings, like this one from Origen (which is in background of the famous Good Samaritan window at Chartres below - my pic from July 2003: notice the Samaritan story coming up the center to undo the story of the Fall narrated around it): The man who was going down is Adam. Jerusalem is paradise, and Jericho is the world. The robbers are hostile powers. The priest is the Law, the Levite is the prophets, and the Samaritan is Christ. The wounds are disobedience, the beast is the Lord’s body, the [inn], which accepts all who wish to enter, is the Church. … The manager of the [inn] is the head of the Church, to whom its care has been entrusted. And the fact that the Samaritan promises he will return represents the Savior’s second coming.

But in the heat of the moment, my contrarian pedagogy (or pedagogical contrariness) led me to suggest that it was an anti-religious story. The religious specialists in the parable, not to mention the legal scholar to whom Jesus addresses the parable, love their neighbors less than the outlaw Samaritan. Wouldn't we all be better off paying less attention to religion and more to our neighbors?

And yet, the claim that piety makes people self-righteous rather than righteous may seem intuitively true to us in part because of the place of this parable in our sacred tradition! Go figure.

Cultures of the Religious Right 2

After sleeping long but not very deeply, I spent the day puttering about, finalizing my syllabus - class starts tomorrow. (I have only one class this semester; presumably First Year Chair responsibilities will take up the balance of my time.) This picture adorns the cover of the syllabus for "Cultures of the Religious Right" - have I told you about that course? I first taught it two and a half years ago, in response to the election of 2004 and the infuriating "red America/blue America" babble which attended it. It seemed to me that the evangelical Christian subcultures of the US were ones which liberals needed to understand - and religious people needed to take seriously. This time around the political situation's a bit different, in part because George Bush is no longer on the ascendant (to put it mildly) but also because a whole generation of evangelical leaders has disappeared from the scene. The diversity of evangelical subcultures is visible as never before - even to the liberal press, which usually gets this stuff wrong. (They're wrong to say that it's business as usual again; the new generation of evangelicals supporting Mike Huckabee will soon generate their own candidates who don't reject Darwin, and they will be attractive and powerful.) I'll keep you posted on how it unfolds!