L.B.: Casting the first millstone

Satire is traditionally the weapon of the powerless against the powerful. I only aim at the powerful. When satire is aimed at the powerless, it is not only cruel -- it's vulgar.

-- Molly Ivins

This Sandy Huffaker cartoon is, at best, a case of collateral damage.

At first glance, it seems to take aim at Hollywood and the vapidity of so many movie releases, but the sub-Mad Magazine level film titles on the marquee don't pack much of a punch. ("Laffs About Nothing" -- is that supposed to be bad?) So the real target here seems to be the audience, represented by the cruelly drawn figures in the corner. The cartoon's most vicious contempt isn't directed at the purveyors of dreck, but at the consumers on whom they inflict this stuff.

This is a stumbling point for many critics of pop culture -- whether of the movies, or television, Top 40 radio or mass market fiction. All of these seem like easy targets, but it's trickier than it looks because there are too many innocent people in the way to get off a clean shot. The critic who sets out to say that TV is stupid and crass winds up arguing that TV viewers are stupid and crass. The critic who opens his mouth to call romance novels silly and unworthy closes his mouth having called all the women who read them silly and unworthy.

And that's not cool. First of all, it's not a very winsome approach to persuading others to accept whatever point it is you're trying to make. "You're an idiot," is rarely a useful starting point if you're trying to get the other person to listen to the rest of what you have to say. The result of this approach, as in the cartoon, is a sneering elitism.

Let me be clear about that word, "elitism." There's nothing wrong with having high standards for popular art and popular entertainment, standards that help you (and others) to separate the good stuff from the inferior. But when those standards are turned against the audience, when they're used to separate the good people from the supposedly inferior, that's when the critic loses my respect and attention. That's when the critic loses everybody's attention. This is what makes such critics truly elitist -- the tiny circle of people still listening to them is, indeed, an exclusive elite.

Such critics also, perversely, end up siding with those they initially set out to criticize because they reinforce the dreck-merchants' standard fall-back defense, "We're just giving the audience what they want."

The main problem here, though, is that such critics are blaming the victim. That's just wrong. Someone who has been tricked into paying good money for a Clay Aiken CD has suffered enough. There's no need to add insult to injury.

Which brings us to Joe Bageant's essay on the World's Worst Books, "What the 'Left Behind' Series Really Means."

Much of Bageant's essay is fun, an entertainingly and appropriately horrified reaction to a series of books that fails on every level (except sales). I've pointed out a few of those books' shortcomings myself, and for the most part I agree with this aspect of Bageant's jeremiad. He's right to point out that these books are more than just shoddy entertainments, that they are dangerous and damaging propaganda. And he's particularly on the money in discussing Tim LaHaye and Jerry Jenkins' unseemly delight in the fictional suffering and death of those who disagree with them, as well as their bizzarre belief that this fictional vindication provides some real-world validation for their perspective.

So nothing Bageant writes about the books or their authors bothers me. But what he writes about their readers does.

He begins with a promising line of thought:

How can anyone acquire and hold such notions? Answer: The same way you got yours and I got mine. Conditioning. From family and school and society, but from within a different American caste than the one in which you were raised. ...

Tens of millions of American fundamentalists ... read and absorb the all-time best selling Left Behind book series as prophecy and fact. How could they possibly not after being conditioned all their lives to accept the End Times as the ultimate reality?

This is promising because it begins to explore the question of why these horrible books are such big sellers. Figuring out how this "conditioning" was done is an important part of figuring out how it can be undone -- how these people can be rescued from that conditioning. How these readers might be, well, saved.

Bageant himself is a recovering fundamentalist. He grew up steeped in End Times-mania and "prophecy" obsession. So his own personal history ought to suggest to him that change is possible, that these "tens of millions of American fundamentalists" trapped in a warped and circumscribed worldview can be liberated from it.

But he's not interested in liberating them. He writes them off. It turns out his use of the word "caste" above was not merely an unfortunately careless accident. He means it. To Bageant, the readers of Left Behind are the Untouchables, inferiors who should be left to their own sad fate.

Here is just a sampling of the scorn heaped upon those readers, what he calls "the great unwashed tribes of the faithful ":

We are talking about a group of Americans 20% of whose children graduate from high school identifying H₂O as a cable channel. Children who, like their parents and grandparents, come from that roughly half of all Americans who can approximately read, but are dysfunctionally literate to the extent they cannot grasp any textual abstraction or overall thematic content. ...

Allow me to get down to the nub of this and say what urban liberals cannot allow themselves to say out loud: "Christian majority or not, the readers of such apocalyptic books as the Left Behind series are some pretty damned dumb motherfuckers caught up in their own black, vindictive fantasy."

Bageant begins his essay by quoting a 15-year-old fan of the series, who said, "The best thing about the Left Behind books is the way the non-Christians get their guts pulled out by God."

That makes Bageant angry, and he's right to be angry. But he's wrong to direct that anger at the 15-year-old kid or the millions of readers like him.

"If anyone causes one of these little ones who believe in me to sin," Jesus said, "it would be better for him to be thrown into the sea with a large millstone tied around his neck." That's angry. But the anger is directed at the proper target -- at the powerful and not the powerless.

LaHaye and Jenkins are fair game. They have grown wealthy and powerful by causing the little ones who believe to sin. They deserve to have a millstone -- or at least a millstone-sized book review -- tied around their necks.

But their readers -- these little ones -- are already suffering enough. They need our pity and our patience, not our scorn.

(For a far more charitable and empathetic, and therefore more hopeful and constructive, look at this same subculture, see Christopher Hedges' "The Radical Christian Right Is Built on Suburban Despair.")

Comments

[jody]

I am stunned by the wisdom of this installment.

I get the same feeling when I read about cult members who are hypnotizes into doing their leader's will. I pity the cult members and I set the leader in my crosshairs.

I used to believe the pre-trib rapture hype. I read 9 of the LB series before I couldn't take it anymore.

When I told my church leaders I no longer held to the pre-trib rapture view, I was immediately told I could NEVER teach the Bible in their church again. I soon left the church, and my "wacky post-trib" reputation spread so fast no one even talks to me anymore.

The agenda behind the LB series, nay, the militant following of the pre-trib rapture *view* is so alienating and hypnotic it becomes devisive within the body. I cannot in good conscience blame the followers, since I was one once, but I do wonder about the millstone swinging from the necks of the leaders.

[John]

I winced when I read those portions of Bageant's piece. Mostly in recognition that I have a tendency to think that way, too.

[Fraser]

I'm always extremely uncomfortable with the arguments that "if you read this, you must believe that" (or "If you read this, it will make you believe that"). It's like assuming that everyone who reads Punisher comics must support summary execution.

[Jon]

On the one hand, I understand and agree with the premise of this essay, that we should work to save the powerless from the depredations of the powerful who would teach them incorrect and harmful things.

But on the other hand, the followers of those born again beliefs are currently the powerful. They control the presidency and much of Congress. There are huge tracts of the south and the west where they wield immense influence.

The anger at born again Christians for their warping of American politics is real, and the damage done to the body politic by the political will of born again Christians causes others to be more interested in the destruction of their power than in saving their souls.

[JS Bangs]

Yeah, I found the Bageant piece a bit overblown. I, too, grew up in an evangelical household and since shook off the Rapturism and right-wing paranoia, but I still couldn't recognize most of what he said about fundamentalists. Actually, I think even pitying evangelicals is rather condescending: it turns out that many of them are intelligent and articulate and believe as they do for good reasons. These people are probably the ones who bought the first Left Behind book, realized that it's dreck, and abandoned them. The fact that they still sold millions of copies doesn't prove anything more than the fact that The DaVinci Code (which was also dreck) sold millions of copies.

BTW, appealing to religious values in a political campaign != breaking separation of church and state. That theocracy meme needs to die.

[Christine]

I agree with you, to a point. But I think you may be giving too little credit to the "victims" here. If consumers of trash entertainment are not to blame, aren't you assuming that they are too incompetent to be held accountable? While scorn may be counterproductive, isn't it beneficial to tell someone, "Come on, you are smarter than this!"

My best friend has read LB, and found it adequately entertaining. She didn't delve deep or truly think through what she was reading. She accepted the premises of the fictional world, just as one does with any fantasy novel, and followed the characters having an adventure. She is by no means stupid. However, I'd say she has a low "need for cognition," in part because she has defined herself as not-intellectual. Without having any contempt or scorn for her, I also have enough respect for her to treat her as an intelligent person, and I tell her what I think of some of the pap she consumes.

[Bugmaster]

Well, I'm going to go out on a limb here, and claim that anyone who revels in the vindictive wrath of Left Behind ("take that, infidels !") is not a very nice person. I will go out even further and claim that anyone who thinks that the LB series are a literary masterpiece is borderline illiterate. Now, this may not be their fault. It may be due to "conditioning", upbringing, some personal tragedy, whatever. But the bottom line is, I think that people who gleefully await the day (Real Soon Now !) when everyone but a chosen few get gibbed by Jesus deserve the scorn they get. You can't put all the blame on the leaders. People are supposed to have free will, they can choose not to follow.

[ohiolibrarian]

Yes, but ...
don't the followers bear any responsibility? They may have been led astray, but it was still their choice to follow the leader. Is the 15-year-old (LB kid) reveling in God pulling people's guts out exactly the same as a 15-year-old (video kid) who thinks the graphics in his video game of someone getting his guts pulled out is way cool? Both kids are, I think, being desensitized to violence and cruelty, but there are some important differences. Video kid thinks he is dealing with fantasy and if asked would probably say that he would hate to have it done to him. LB kid may think he is dealing with (ultimate, God-given) reality and if asked may say that it could never be done to him because he is saved.

[Zzyzx]

I read Rapture Ready. I see how the people there revel in the idea of war, root for natural disasters, and work to oppose any peace movement because that's a sign of the anti-christ. It might be how they were raised, but I'm going to hold them responsible for any consequences of their actions.

[Jon]

"BTW, appealing to religious values in a political campaign != breaking separation of church and state. That theocracy meme needs to die."

I believe the author of the linked article was speaking more of things like the White House decision to create an office that gives money directly to religious organizations, and things like that, rather than the mere attempts to draw in voters by playing on their religious sympathies.

There is a definite movement towards theocracy in this country. It scares the hell out of me.

[adam]

I've read this kind of ranting before. It's like what you write, Fred, but it's from a different place emotionally. It's from the same sort of headspace that turned out "Journey To the End Of the Night" and everything else Celine wrote-- reeling from a traumatic past and making conclusions about the fates of the societies responsible for that trauma. For what it's worth, I don't think he's 100% right, but this kind of rant is at least usefully wrong.

After WWI Celine was faced with the possibility that he was the "last sane coward" in a Europe populated by millions of people who belonged on suicide watch for how much they seemed to love war. Damaged as he was, he came to the conclusion that the Jews, always smarter than the "pure" Europeans who loved nothing more than killing each other, would simply wait for white people to burn themselves out, then take over with the help of other "impure" people. He spared no one among the "pure" their share of the blame, as he saw it, for ethnic suicide; everyone seemed to be moving in the same way, and he was certain that whites' destiny was to be "makeup base" for the ethnicities smart enough not to wipe themselves out. The only substantial ideological difference between himself and the Nazis was that he didn't think they'd succeed.

He was mostly wrong. The Nazis did fail to "purify" humanity, but Europeans have hardly died out as an ethnicity-- if it's even accurate to call "European" one distinct ethnicity, which I doubt-- and Europe's now home to the highest standards of living among nations on any continent.

But Celine's works were usefully wrong; the idea that nations can and will, if their aggressions go unchecked, destroy themselves, even in an age of increasingly powerful science and technology, was a vital idea in the growth of the modern Left. Trotsky, no slouch as a reader or writer, said that Celine walked into great ideas the way a man might walk into a room, even though Celine himself never sided with anyone he perceived as optimists, Marxist or Nazi.

This guy's coming from that same anger and hopelessness. But I don't have to like his attacks on ordinary people to realize that the existence of a sizable minority in this country that consistently rejects true morality in favor of a twisted version of Christianity could lead other people to conclude, having read his rant or not, that Americans are ignorant sadists. That, possibly, leads to hatred of ordinary Americans. And that leads to worse relations between the ordinary Americans who've gone fundamentalist and the ordinary Americans who've had a chance to realize fundamentalism's immorality.

For every Celine, there's got to be a Sartre.

[Steve]

Fred,

Great post...reminds of an article you wrote in PRISM Magazine in the mid-90's about welfare reform pointing out how many of the politicians (the powerful) promoting reform were blaming society's problems on welfare recipient's (the powerless).

Also brings to mind the reaction I got from a college professor and good friend of mine at Eastern U. to one of your initial posts about left behind entitled Left Behind Is Evil. I sent him this link and he kind of agreed, but he reacted to you calling his grandmother evil and anti-Christian for believing this end-times nonense. In re-reading, you didn't do that, but he read that into your post. Anyway, a good caution on the use of language for me, and today's post has been very insightful for me in how I offer critique.

[Steve]

But on the other hand, the followers of those born again beliefs are currently the powerful. They control the presidency and much of Congress. There are huge tracts of the south and the west where they wield immense influence.

The anger at born again Christians for their warping of American politics is real, and the damage done to the body politic by the political will of born again Christians causes others to be more interested in the destruction of their power than in saving their souls.

Jon, I think Fred's point is, direct your anger at this to the pastors, politicians, and political organizations that promote this...not the average church goer.

[jody]

I think it CAN be condescending to pity evangelicals, but not if they are "new believers" or children, and these kinds of values are thrust upon them socially as they try to get their bearings in their faith.
So often people try to substitute the Holy Spirit for garbage like that. I suppose a better word to use other than pity is compassion.
Jesus had compassion on the multitudes, knowing their history and their current situations, and their psychological positions. There ARE extremely intelligent evangelicals today who are convinced of an extremely young un-biblical concept and they will argue definitively and vehemently to prove their point.
When you present an counter argument to them and they refuse to accept it, I think we should still have compassion for them. At least that's what I would have hoped for when I shifted my end times views.

[the opoponax]

the interesting thing about Bageant's piece is that he's ultimately using the fact that most christian fundamentalists are economically and thus educationally poor as a key reason that Left Behind is bad.

there are just so many class issues all wound up in his essay, it kind of makes my head spin.

[Angelika]

ohiolibrarian Yes, but ...
don't the followers bear any responsibility?

Yes, they do. - But the question is, have we therefore the right to point our fingers at them? Do we really know, that we would act/believe differently, if we were in their position?

Having grown up in Germany, the question about responsibility of every single citizen for the actions of the state, for not following the wrong lead were discussed and stressed ad nauseam. Funnily though, those of my classmates who were the loudest to condem their grandparents' lack of valor, were in the same time those who laughed and snickered each time my very intelligent, but not very popular friend contributed something. (As she was very smart, most of her contributions were good and not at all laughable.) So basically, while they expected other people to good in the face of a certain powerful evil, they themselves did not even manage to be kind and curteous in resistance to a bit of peer pressure. - I learned out of that experience that, while none of us would have fallen for the 'The jews are the cause of all evil' lie, we would so easily have fallen for something else given a little bit more pressure.

Both authors Fred cited, pointed out two important facts: The rather vindictive 'we against them' mindset in religious fundamentalism, and the fact that many of its followers are under considerable pressure (inner cities, little education available etc.). I think both of them are right. If we consider religious fundamentalism as a danger, we have to reduce that pressure. Just telling people 'you are wrong/stupid etc.' doesn't help a bit.

[J]

Bageant begins his essay by quoting a 15-year-old fan of the series, who said, "The best thing about the Left Behind books is the way the non-Christians get their guts pulled out by God."
That makes Bageant angry, and he's right to be angry. But he's wrong to direct that anger at the 15-year-old kid or the millions of readers like him.

No, actually he isn't. That kid deserves to be hated.

[Brad]

Fred and Bageant both miss the point. The flock are not stupid, and they do not believe and act as they do because they have been told to by popular leaders -- the leaders are popular because they are saying what the people want to hear.

If the pastors and politicians changed their tune, they would influence a few, but the vast majority would disown these heretics and find somebody else who would tell them what they want to hear. Listen to the story on This American Life about the preacher who stopped believing in Hell for an example of this in action.

The Christianists who I've met that have brought us our current American body politic and its disastrous effects on the world are just as smart as the rest of us. Their belief in the patently absurd is not due to being stupid; it's a deliberate doublethink. They hate and fear gays, Arabs ("sand niggers"), people who choose to live a different lifestyle, taxes, giving up their SUV, etc. but their deep moral intuition tells them that this is wrong, so they seek out somebody who will tell them that it is not only OK to feel that way, it is Righteous. They seek out leaders like GWB whose policies and priorities are far from Christ's, but "talk about Our Lord" in a way that strokes their personal ego - they like to hear the President tell them what great people they are, the moral fiber and backbone of the world, that he's just like them.

They don't believe this because they're stupid or brainwashed. They believe it because they are selfish and shallow like the rest of us and choosing to believe that this is how God wants them to be is easier than the hard work of actually following Christ's teachings.

The enabler is just the enabler. The problem is the addicts', and they have to want to change, and are personally responsible for their actions. I just hope they don't drag the whole world to "rock bottom" with them before they decide to give up their habit.

[the opoponax]

but angelika, many of us posting here have "been in their place" before. whether we grew up in evangelical families and communities or simply have always been subjected to attempted conversions.

so not only do we know that we wouldn't/haven't fallen for the worst of the evangelical line, many of us know that we have specifically chosen not to even darken the doors of such churches, or have escaped from them. we're not the next generation of germans talking about how we would never have fallen for such tripe, we're resisters in that original generation.

that said, i think there's another level to what you're bringing up. how many of us are tempted to fall for the worst extremes in our own beliefs, to embrace things simply because they appeal to tribal affiliations (as so many have claimed for why they like LB -- because it's a book about evangelical christians getting to be heroes)? and in that sense, i think you really have something.

[hapax]

Climbing on a soapbox here -- this is one reason there is a DESPERATE need for non-fiction for older elementary and younger teens that is as engaging and interesting as fiction. I know that I basically educated myself by hiding in the library all day (a progressive, LORD OF THE FLIES - type school, long story) and reading -- not just fiction, but wonderful books of history, and science, and linguistics, and mythology. I've tried to find similar books for my children, but they just aren't being written -- apparently the publishers have ceded the juvenile non-fiction market to "report books" (boring fact collections), trivia-and-factoid conglomerates like Dorling Kindersley pap, and the Internet.

A lot of these evangelical parents would not let their children read "demonic" fiction (I've even had "Little Women" described to me that way, I kid you not, it apparently "subverts parental authority") but would have no problem with the little ones reading non-fiction. Not about "evolution" or "islamofascism", of course, but something as harmless as a well-written book about horses or proverbs or even "Biblical archaeology" can work in a great deal of science and history, and begin a habit of research and critical thinking.

[jw]

There were far too many LB books sold to narrowly classify all the readers. Inherently this makes Bageant's point of view wrong.

[Ken]

I winced when I read Bageat's rant. Even realizing it was a rant, pure and simple. His reflexive bashing of "The Right Wing" and GWB is an mirror image of the reflexive bashing of "Godless Liberals" and The Antichrist in the "Fundies" he rages about. Or the bashing of "Zionists and Infidels, the Little & Great Satans" in al-Qaeda's rants.

1) Beware of when you fight a monster of ultimate evil, you don't end up becoming a monster yourself. (Like how Naziism and Communism in WW2 became funhouse mirrors of each other.)

2) That said, when Christianity goes sour (as written by both Bageat & Hedges) it ends up resembling Islam. Over in the archives of Internet Monk there's this essay called "A Marriage Made in Hell", showing how Left Behind Fever matches up very well with Islam's own apocalyptic beliefs (like the "Twelfth Imam" cult in power in Iran) in a similar yin/yang funhouse-mirror of reciprocal "Here Ahuramazda, There Ahriman!"

As for me, both my writing partner and myself are Late Great Planet Earth burnouts (our last flashbacks near-simultaneous in 1988). It messed up our heads for years -- over a decade the locusts have eaten -- with a lot of the symptoms from Bageat & Hedges' own "Rapture Scare" experiences. (After an especially-vivid Rapture Dream in the early Seventies, I find myself still unable to look out a kitchen window towards the southern sky. Fortunately, my kitchen window faces NW.) We have both experienced the fruits (by their fruits ye shall know them) of PMD/Pre-Trib/Darbyite "SCRIPTURE!" and speak against it whenever we can. (Internet Monk's site is currently doing a series about the use of fear in evangelical theology as-preached. This bears on the subject, as both Bageat & Hedges attest that the basic foundation of LB-style Christianity is fear & terror -- "Don't be Left Behind!")

(For the record, politically I'm probably 180 degrees from both Slacktivist & Bageat. However, as a long-time SF/fantasy fan, I enjoy Slack's LB review/expose because (like St Thomas Aquinas) I believe shoddy work is a sin. Especially when that shoddy work bears a lot of bad fruit. As I said at a Christian Fandom meeting at an SF con several years ago, "I like the fact that something made the jump from Christian ghetto to mainstream best-seller. I AM NOT THRILLED ABOUT IT BEING A HERE-COMES-THE-ANTICHRIST CONSPIRACY-PARANOIA TRIP. DON'T WE HAVE ANY BETTER STORIES TO TELL?") And, after reading Slack dissecting the bad hackwork at this URL, I now add "CAN'T WE TELL THEM BETTER?"

[the opoponax]

"...but their deep moral intuition tells them that this is wrong, so they seek out somebody who will tell them that it is not only OK to feel that way, it is Righteous..."

i'm not sure this is entirely apt. mainly because it presupposes that those of us who aren't fundievangelicals are 100% perfectly adjusted liberal recyclers who drive hybrids and have purged ourselves of all traces of prejudice and bigotry. which isn't true. most people in the US at least fall somewhere in the middle. and yet there are only about $80 million evangelicals -- less than 30%. not to mention that there are many people who fit that description exactly and yet haven't fallen for the hard fundie sell. there are more registered republicans in this country than evangelical christians.

not to mention that there are other groups who, when the Bush Administration uses their rhetoric to justify atrocities, just roll their eyes and understand that it's politics as usual, and that Bush couldn't care less about their issues. for instance feminists. there are more self-described feminists in this country than there are crazy fundies; it would actually make more sense for the president to appeal to a sort of mild liberal reformist feminism than to appeal to insane religious extremists (in fact, this is what clinton did, and part of why he was so successful). and yet when bush said that we needed to fight the war on terror to free muslim women, well guess what, 9 out of 10 feminists said, "yeah, right" and could spit back reams of information about how misguided that idea is. as most moderate christians can when Bush uses Christian justifications for going to war. so, no, not everybody would just fall in line if you played to their issues and made them feel good about themselves.

[Ken]

But the bottom line is, I think that people who gleefully await the day (Real Soon Now !) when everyone but a chosen few get gibbed by Jesus deserve the scorn they get.

Armageddon is not a specator sport, with a catered banquet in your season-ticket box.

The prophets called it "The Great and TERRIBLE DAY of the LORD"; the image used over and over is "the refiner's fire", i.e. smelting metal out of ore. You know how you get pure metal out of ore?

The blast furnace, the white-hot crucible, the hammer (blacksmith or foundry triphammer) literally BEATING the slag out of the orange-hot metal. All the ingots, not just the chosen "unclean ones". ("For all have sinned and come short of the glory of God...")

My church calls this Purgatory; others call it "the Judgement Seat of Christ for Believers" or bema. (Maybe Hell is just the slag dump, and the damned are those who were all slag with NO metal in them.) Whatever, it does not sound like a pleasant experience, even if the end result will be worth it. Not something to rub your hands and smack your lips over it happening to "Them" and not "Us".

(Paraphrase of a C.S.Lewis comment on The End, I think the original is in "The World's Last Night"): We only want God to work halfway -- end war and disease, but let us keep our own pet hatreds and sexual kinks. God doesn't work that way; he will end ALL sin, not just the other guy's. Package deal; you're going into the fire and under the hammer with everyone and everything else.

[Constantine]

For the record, I'd probably watch "Car Chase to Nowhere", "Screenwriter Massacre", and "Laffs About Nothing", at least as rentals.

[LL]

I agree with jody ("I think it CAN be condescending to pity evangelicals, but not if they are "new believers" or children, and these kinds of values are thrust upon them socially as they try to get their bearings in their faith.")

I wouldn't suggest going about disagreeing with these people the way this Bageant guy does (I haven't read his entire essay yet), but it does seem to me that to pity adult followers of idiotic beliefs as if they are small, slow children who don't have responsibility for their own choices is pretty insulting in and of itself. My mother loves Bush, thinks Dobson et al are great, says she believes the world is only 6,000 years old, etc. She's not stupid, which is why it bothers me that she believes stupid things. And if I told her that I felt sorry for her that her (my theories) fear of death and insecurity and feelings of inferiority make her believe these things, she'd be mightily insulted. So I don't say any of those things. I actually don't say a lot about her idiotic belief system, though she gives me plenty of openings when I visit. But disagreeing with her hurts her feelings and/or makes her angry, so I usually don't say anything. Belief is a choice, and you are either a not very smart person who's been manipulated by some huckster, or you are a reasonably intelligent adult who made a choice to follow the huckster for reasons that probably have more to do with your self-image and state of mind than the persuasive nature of the beliefs themselves. I don't think the former is necessarily nicer than the latter, just maybe not quite so confrontational. It's not that the hucksters shouldn't have to answer for their words and deeds, just that these kinds of people would not have the power and influence they have had throughout history if there weren't a lot of people who were eager to exchange their capacity for free thought for the (always unproven) promise of everlasting life, salvation, wealth, happiness, status, etc.

But Fred's point is well taken, that it is counterproductive (at least) to dismiss millions of people as idiots and just leave it at that. Otherwise, why bother? If all you can do is name-call, you're no better than Ann Coulter, and if that doesn't give you pause, then nothing will.

[the opoponax]

"'Little Women' described to me that way, I kid you not, it apparently 'subverts parental authority'"

wow. have these people actually read Little Women? every other sentence is about helping their parents, doing their parents proud, making sacrifices so that their parents can be happy, etc. one of the key scenes of the book is Jo selling her hair to a wigmaker so that her mother can afford to make the train trip to Washington to visit her father, who has been wounded in battle in the Civil War. the book opens on Christmas eve, as the four sisters either wrap their gifts to their mother or discuss what they're getting her (i forget). the youngest sister, Amy, who is meant to be the most selfish and liable to temptation, returns the drawing pencils she bought for herself so that she can buy her mother a better gift.

this is the sort of thing where i start to think that these people know exactly what they're doing, they're just dangerous liars. the only way you can regard Little Women a dangerous book is if you regard the liberal tradition as evil -- there are several sequences in the book where the parents' feminist and abolitionist credentials are revealed, and the most serious theme of the book is that we should stand up for truth, justice, freedom, and human rights. all things the crazifundies are openly against.

[Jesurgislac]

hapax: I've even had "Little Women" described to me that way, I kid you not, it apparently "subverts parental authority")

Any book that presents a different point of view from that of your parents, if it presents that POV in an intelligent and appealling way, is inherently subversive of parental authority. Sure, the four March girls all adore and revere and obey Marmee and Mr March, but the March parents' values are almost certainly not those of your average evangelical Christian.

[the opoponax]

jesu, you always say exactly what i wanted to say, except far more eloquently.

[LL]

RE "Little Women" and other unacceptable books: these people come up with a million different reasons why you shouldn't read a book that they didn't produce themselves. They don't want you giving your money to the estate of Louisa May Alcott, or whoever owns the copyright now, they want you buying their crap. The Christian book market is a big racket, like those old school snake oil salesmen. They first tell you everything that's "wrong" with a classic book and then offer their cornball, poorly written alternatives as a godly substitute. If there isn't something wrong with a book they can't make money off of, they'll make something up. Don't try to understand it, because it doesn't make any sense.
This is not to say that the Christian book market is any more of a racket than any other, just saying, it's not better, either. If the Christian writers really wanted you to have their precious knowledge, they'd give it away instead of making you shell out for it. That's what Jesus would do.

[Patrick McGonegal]

Lahaye and Jenkins are no more fair game than the readers themselves. Lahaye and Jenkins are merely doing what any good businessperson would do--using their target demographic's beliefs to sell a product. The real "enemies" here are the individuals who perpetuate the mindset of this 15-year-old child--i.e. the child's parents, religious teachers, friends of equal philosophical persuasion, and religious folks in general.

While I am a great fan of the writing ability of the slacktivist (I think you are probably one of the preeminent blogger/writers writing today), I am still continually amazed at the blindspot you reserve for your philosophical beliefs. I usually would not be so critical of someone's philosophical meanderings, but you seem to be constantly trying to condemn in others the very fault you possess.

People will always take advantage of naivety and ignorance for financial gain, whether the subject is religion or technology or used cars. Calling these salesmen on the carpet will not rectify the situation. The only way to fix the problem is to remove the naivety and ignorance. Contrary to what your post seems to indicate, criticizing specific beliefs while encouraging the ones that spawned them is not the solution. You are then guilty yourself of creating the very caste system you decry (I am allowed my "privileged" beliefs but you aren't allowed your "ignorant" ones...).

Why are Lahaye and Jenkins more evil than the folks that taught this kid that God wants non-Christians to have their guts ripped out? The fact that this kid liked this depiction illustrates that he/she was preconditioned to like it, does it not? Lahaye and Jenkins are pretty sure that most Christians (children or otherwise) have this same preconditioning and that is exactly such sections appear in their books.

Lahaye and Jenkins are no different than purveyors of pornography. They are targeting a specific audience. Don't blame them for the predilections of their clientele. They saw a market and they are exploiting that market.

Additionally, we shouldn't be confusing rich with powerful. Most rich people are powerful, but not all powerful people are necessarily rich. The powerful people you need to be directing your scorn towards are those philosophically powerful people (religious pundits) who instill and reinforce such stereotypical ignorance in their followers. When it comes to religious conviction, this includes a wide range of individuals (as I stated before). First and foremost are parents. Then there are local religious teachers and fellow believers/church members. These are followed by state and national religious leaders. And at the very end of this list--only appearing after the ideological brainwashing is pretty much complete--come the likes of Lahaye and Jenkins.

So where do we start? We start with ourselves. We ensure that we aren't reinforcing stupid, irrational, stereotypical philosophies. We make sure that we set an example of thought above belief, of reason above opinion, and of logic above superstition. After all, let's not condemn someone for glorying in the "false" notion of God's disemboweling of infidels when we are still holding fast to equally preposterous ideas regarding religion and spirituality. That's just splitting hairs.

So, my challenge to you, Sir Slacktivist, is to turn that piercing light of logic you bear on your own beliefs and see if you can defend them here any better than those of this wayward fifteen-year-old reader of pulp-church-fiction. After all, you can't expect to purge from someone else what you will not/cannot purge from yourself.

[Beth]

If all you can do is name-call, you're no better than Ann Coulter

Um, no. If, in addition to name-calling, you advocated hatred, assassination, and mass murder, but managed to refrain from ordering your audience to attack people who heckled you, you'd still be better than Ann Coulter.

[the opoponax]

"This is not to say that the Christian book market is any more of a racket than any other, just saying, it's not better, either."

the "secular" book market generally does not discredit classics in order to convince parents to buy new more profitable product. in fact, the secular market tends to promote the classics, especially for children and teens. i don't know what their motivation is for that, but i've never heard of anybody at, say, Random House, saying that you should eschew Grimm's Fairy Tales for some trumped up moral reason and instead buy the latest installment or 20 of Junie B. Jones. and i've freelanced at major publishing houses, know plenty of publishing types socially, etc.

also, i'm pretty sure Little Women is in the public domain now, which means that if some Christian imprint wants to put out their own edition and make money off it, they're welcome to it.

not to mention that Fundievangelicals seem perfectly happy to embrace The Chronicles of Narnia which is not published by a Christian imprint but by Harper Collins. the Christian book racket stands to make less money off Narnia than Little Women, and yet they still condemn the latter and champion the former.

[kebko]

I think it's much more elitist to feel pity than it is to feel scorn. Scorn presupposes much more respect for the target than pity does.

[Vanya_6724]

I really wonder whether Bageant has properly identified the group who reads this trash. He seems to think it's the type of person you see on Jerry Springer. I always thought the typical LB reader was probably college educated (state or christian school), works in a middle management position, or in sales, or is a housewife with a middle class income in a red state. They're probably not that dumb - at least when it comes to fixing things, organizing church events, coaching sports teams, etc. they're probably quite competent, but they have been brought up to fear difference and have no real intellectual curiosity about the outside world. I think the mouth breathing trailer trash Bageant is going on about are not big consumers of any sort of book, even Left Behind.

[the opoponax]

"Why are Lahaye and Jenkins more evil than the folks that taught this kid that God wants non-Christians to have their guts ripped out?"

Lahaye and Jenkins are the folks that taught this kid that God wants non-Christians to have their guts ripped out. especially LaHaye, who is in fact an evangelical preacher and talking head. he's in the same league with Robertson, Dobson, Falwell, and Haggard, setting the tone for this entire community, developing these sorts of doctrines and party lines. your argument might stand for Jenkins (he's really just a ghost writer, or at least he started out that way), but it certainly does not hold up at all for LaHaye.

[Painini]

After all, let's not condemn someone for glorying in the "false" notion of God's disemboweling of infidels when we are still holding fast to equally preposterous ideas regarding religion and spirituality. That's just splitting hairs.

So, my challenge to you, Sir Slacktivist, is to turn that piercing light of logic you bear on your own beliefs ...

Nice little slip from 'we' to 'you'. (I admit I saw it coming a mile away, but it's cute that you tried.)

Look, I can enjoy the theism/atheism threads as much as anyone, but aren't there about four of them still going at this minute?

[Zzyzx]

The problem with blaming the leaders and excusing the followers is that that assumes a hierarchy that doesn't really exist. Regular True Christians feel more than free to judge pastors, people with tv shows, authors, etc if they're not spreading the Real True Christian Gospel.

Moreover, they feel a calling not just to believe their religion but to convince others. So to some degree, they're the teachers themselves. It's harder to say that you should forgive the student but blame the teacher when everyone plays both roles.

From my reading, it's much less like people get their orders from some leader than everyone is constantly thinking about this subject and feels free to put pressure on everyone else to be uberserious too (e.g. "Christ is our bridegroom! That means that we shouldn't go on living our lives like we're concerned about them. How would you like to be excited about your marriage and then discover that your bride was more interested in her single life?"). It's less of a cult and more of an echo chamber.

[Angelika]

Patrick McGonegal They saw a market and they are exploiting that market.

And how is consciously exploiting something bad as market an innocent thing? Exploiting somebody's faults as a market, means very often reinforcing them.

[Ken]

If all you can do is name-call, you're no better than Ann Coulter...

Or Al Franken.

Remember my previous post about funhouse mirrors?

[Rob]

"The real 'enemies' here are the individuals who perpetuate the mindset of this 15-year-old child--i.e. the child's parents, religious teachers, friends of equal philosophical persuasion, and religious folks in general."

The problem is that the fundamentalist world is a very closed community. Most people in the church are both taking advantage and taken advantage of, and the same goes for the rest of us. I don't think anybody, except maybe a handicapped black gay prepubescent Jainist orphan who lives in the street and always struggles to help old ladies cross the street and gives all his food to stray puppies, is immune to satire.

[Jesurgislac]

...but, but... what's happened to Chloe in The Most Socially Awkward Scenario of All Time? What did Rayford make for dinner? Or did he resolve the problem by calling for pizza? Was the delivery boy Raptured? What goes on a post-Rapture pizza?

[Angelika]

Pineapple, green onions, ham and broccoli

[ako]

I've spotted the opposition to Louisa May Alcott. Good Wives (or depending on the edition, the second half of Little Women), Chapter 11.

The only person who offered enough to make it worth her while to try juvenile literature was a worthy gentleman who felt it his mission to convert all the world to his particular belief. But much as she liked to write for children, Jo could not consent to depict all her naughty boys as being eaten by bears or tossed by mad bulls because they did not go to a particular Sabbath school, nor all the good infants who did go as rewarded by every kind of bliss, from gilded gingerbread to escorts of angels when they departed this life with psalms or sermons on their lisping tongues.

It's not that kind of book. It's a Christian book that suggests people might sin out of some motive other than pure malice, or a simple desire to disobey God. It suggests that there's complex questions in life, and the answers aren't easy, or inevitably obvious (there's a good chunk of neat morality tales, but also some genuine human complications). Jo's unfeminine behavior is treated as something to be corrected (pretty much inevitable for the time) but more sympathetic and less severe than Meg and Amy's fixation on propriety, social graces, and seeming properly feminine. The book presents the idea (and was intended to illustrate it more strongly), that a woman might reasonably choose to not marry, even never marry, and that it's better to do so than to marry the wrong man for the wrong reasons. Mistakes and misbehavior are treated as learning experiences, not horrible, horrible wrongs inflicting eternal, unshakable guilt. And it mocks the idea that children need to be exposed only to stories telling them of the perfect bliss of goodness, and the destruction following misbehavior.

Far bigger than the fear of non-Christian views is a fear of nuance an complexity. Any book that gets beyond a simple right/wrong, yes/no approach is a far bigger menace to this world view than baby-eating demon worshippers who want to throw all Christians to the lions. From that perspective, baby-eating demon worshippers make sense.

[the opoponax]

"Jo's unfeminine behavior is treated as something to be corrected"

hm. i don't remember this at all... interesting. i do remember her particular tomboyisms described as not particularly attractive or charming (Meg is always trying to get her to pay attention to her appearance, be more mindful about rough-housing and befriending boys, etc), but at the same time, they're also generally depicted as the right choice, or at least a quirk of her personality that is unalterable and generally value neutral, even though it may not be embraced by the society around her.

that said, i haven't read it all the way through since i was 10, so i might be missing something.

[Beth]

"If all you can do is name-call, you're no better than Ann Coulter..."

Or Al Franken.

Remember my previous post about funhouse mirrors?

Well, I've seen some funhouse mirrors that were so warped they could literally make Al Franken look like Ann Coulter, so I suppose if I warped my mind to that degree, I wouldn't see much difference between them. I'm just not clear why you think having such a distorted view of reality is a good thing.

[Nicole J. LeBoeuf-Little]

Fred, your paragraph on elitism alone is worth the price of admission.

Also...

"Much of Bageant's essay is fun, an entertainingly and appropriately horrified reaction to a series of books that fails on every level (except sales). I've pointed out a few of those books' shortcomings myself."

You're so sexy when you understate. *G*

[hf]

I agree with most of the post, but I wonder if you understand what you've written here:

Bageant begins his essay by quoting a 15-year-old fan of the series, who said, "The best thing about the Left Behind books is the way the non-Christians get their guts pulled out by God."

That makes Bageant angry, and he's right to be angry. But he's wrong to direct that anger at the 15-year-old kid or the millions of readers like him.

Would you call it wrong for a gay person to express anger at 15-year-olds who rejoice at the violent deaths of "faggots"?

[hf]

Ken, just go see Beth's comment earlier in the thread.

[Angelika]

ako Far bigger than the fear of non-Christian views is a fear of nuance an complexity.

I agree.

That lack of nuance and complexity is properly one of the facors that makes LB so attractive. Actually, that factor makes a lot of bad fantasy literature of the style 'good guys defeat unspeakable evil by slaughtering millions of minions' attractive for many readers.

However, unlike most other fantasy, apparently the LB sort of claims (or is taken as that) a somehow realistic interpretation of the real world. - That's where the simplifying gets dangerous.