Manifested

I've now had a chance to read the "Evangelical Manifesto" that we discussed earlier.

It's rather well done and there's much to commend here. The concluding "Invitation to All" is particularly welcome. So too is what is probably the document's strongest contribution and best hope for achieving what it seeks to accomplish, namely its tone, which is reasonable and almost aggressively civil.

I'm also quite pleased to find that this document, endorsed by some notable and influential leaders in American evangelicalism, includes concern for the poor and the powerless as non-negotiable hallmarks of the faith. And I'm even more pleased that it does so without any sense that such commitments must be over-defended as matters of "controversy." Ditto for the manifesto's repeated references to the stewardship of creation and its fleeting, but welcome, endorsement of "a high view of science" and condemnation of the oppression of women.

There are also several points on which I disagree with the writers and several more points I would need to ask them to clarify. Here, for example:

All too often we have tried to be relevant, but instead of creating "new wineskins for the new wine," we have succumbed to the passing fashions of the moment and made noisy attacks on yesterday’s errors, such as modernism, while capitulating tamely to today’s, such as postmodernism.

The writers here seem to be endorsing something other than "modernism" or "postmodernism," but what that might be isn't quite clear. The logical implication would seem to be pre-modernism, but I'm fairly sure that's not what they mean either.

Postmodern there seems to be a bogeyman word meaning, I take it, all the bad things that it might possibly mean and none of the good. (That's a bit odd in a document that otherwise seems to borrow an awful lot from Stanley Hauerwas.)

Elsewhere the document criticizes fundamentalism as "an essentially modern reaction to the modern world." That's astute, but it's difficult to understand such a critique if a discussion of the failures of modernism, i.e., postmodernism, is forbidden as "error." My best guess here is that what the writers are really on about is what they earlier condemn as "an inadequate view of truth." Their dedication to truth is admirable, but it's also troublesome throughout the document due to their own inadequate view of uncertainty.

One gets the sense that one is reading a document written by people who automatically translate "we cannot be certain" into "there is no truth." This makes it difficult for someone like me, who believes the former but not the latter, to engage what they're saying. In any case a bit of humble, postmodern, chastened, glass-darkly epistemology might have helped to rescue the manifesto's discussion of sola scriptura, which seems premised on the idea that certainty is readily and easily available to us humans. (That notion strikes me as, to borrow a phrase, "an essentially modern reaction to the modern world.")

The other bogeyman word here seems to be "secularism." Making this a bogeyman word leads to some serious confusion in the section of the manifesto subtitled, "A civil rather than a sacred or naked public square." What they're advocating here is secularism, but they've decided they can't call it that, so instead we get a page and a half endorsing secularism and the separation of church and state while simultaneously condemning "secularism" and the "strict separation of church and state." It isn't pretty.

The language they are thus forced to rely on comes from the man who led them into this linguistic mess, from Richard John Neuhaus and his book The Naked Public Square. Neuhaus' big idea there was that secularism is, itself, a kind of religion. Thus, for Neuhaus, a non-sectarian government is really sectarian -- it sides with and privileges non-sectarianism as a kind of state religion. The refusal to impose state-sanctioned sectarian prayer on public school students is thus, in this view, an establishment of the "religion" of secularism. And the refusal to accede to a sectarian argument based primarily on the particular tenets of a sect is thus mere bigotry.

That's just a slightly more sophisticated version of the whole "your 'tolerance' is really just intolerance of my intolerance" shtick, the boilerplate nonsense of bigots attempting to pose as victims. Since the writers of the "Evangelical Manifesto" explicitly condemn "posing as victims" for political gain, they might want to rethink relying on Neuhaus here for the framing of this question.

Where the manifesto ends up on the matter is this:

Our commitment is to a civil public square -- a vision of public life in which citizens of all faiths are free to enter and engage the public square on the basis of their faith, but within a framework of what is agreed to be just and free for other faiths too.

"A civil public square" providing a "framework of what is agreed to be just and free" to "citizens of all faiths" regardless of sectarian particulars. If I were on the "$25,000 Pyramid" and Betty White said all that to me, I'd be shouting "secularism! ... separation of church and state!"

But here's my biggest problem with the document. "Contrary to widespread misunderstanding today, we Evangelicals should be defined theologically, and not politically, socially or culturally," it says on page 4. "Evangelicalism must be defined theologically and not politically; confessionally and not culturally," it repeats on page 8.

Amen and amen. But then on page 13 it says this:

We call for an expansion of our concern beyond single-issue politics, such as abortion and marriage, and a fuller recognition of the comprehensive causes and concerns of the Gospel, and of all the human issues that must be engaged in public life. Although we cannot back away from our biblically rooted commitment to the sanctity of every human life, including those unborn, nor can we deny the holiness of marriage as instituted by God between one man and one woman ...

The "A-word" is out of the bag, and I don't suppose there's anything I could write here to prevent that from becoming the sole and heated topic in the comment thread below, but my point here is not the substance of the anti-abortion and anti-gay stances that the authors say they "cannot back away from." Nor do I want to get distracted by the question of whether or not "the holiness of marriage as instituted by God" would be an adequate line of argument "within a framework of what is agreed to be just and free for other faiths too."

My point here is the authors' perception, probably correct, that their call to move "beyond single-issue politics" needed to be followed immediately by an emphatic demonstration of their agreement with the majority of Evangelicals on those two issues. This document is not about those two things, but the authors recognize that unless they reaffirm these positions on these two issues, then none of the people they're trying to reach will listen to another word they say.

Please don't misunderstand me. I'm not questioning the sincerity of the authors and signatories when they reaffirm these political stances. I am sure they are being perfectly sincere. But what is it that they are doing here with such sincerity? What is the purpose of this ritual reaffirmation?

The authors affirm that they oppose abortion and same-sex marriage in order to demonstrate that they belong, to demonstrate that their voices are legitimate voices in their community, to demonstrate that they are "Evangelicals." And what is the key, the touchstone, the Shibboleth for that demonstration? Two, and only two, political opinions. To be anti-abortion and anti-homosexuality may not be sufficient to demonstrate that one is an Evangelical, but it is necessary -- far more necessary than any given theological or confessional belief.

The manifesto's splendid language about reaching out to "the poor, the sick, the hungry, the oppressed, the socially despised, and being faithful stewards of creation and our fellow-creatures" belongs to a different category. Such opinions are acceptable, perhaps even admirable, but they are not Shibboleths that demonstrate one's valid membership in the community.

Here, then, is the "Evangelical Manifesto." It is an often persuasive and eloquent argument that political and cultural definitions of "Evangelical" are illegitimate. Yet even here -- in the midst of that argument -- the authors cannot avoid bowing to the demands of exactly those political and cultural definitions.

Comments

[kodiak]

"Saying 'earlier eras were better' says far more about the speaker than their era."

This thinking always makes me laugh. Then I have to take the speaker through their logical fallacy, which generally goes like this:
me: Describe what position you think you would have held in that ideal society of the past
them: *describes the upper class, or at least the high middle-class*
me: Are you currently independantly wealthy?
them: no
me: Do you come from a long line of aristocrats?
them: no
me: Are your skills average or above average?
them: average
me: then why do you think that in this beautific past era you would be one of the upper class instaead of the hoi polloi? The people of the class you are currently in lived lives that are much more difficult than your own, they struggled and they worked, and they didn't have the conveniences you can afford now. Do you really want to go back to that time if you couldn't be a mover or a shaker?
them: ...

Ok, not totally on-topic, but a good way of dealing with people who believe in a mythical "better days" of yore.

[yagowe]

And people don't want uncertainty, they want concrete answers.

I demand clearly defined areas of doubt and uncertainty.

[Tonio]

me: then why do you think that in this beautific past era you would be one of the upper class instaead of the hoi polloi?

That's the question I have for believers in past lives. If the time period was ancient Rome, they imagine themselves as an emperor, instead of some poor sap cleaning up lion shit in the Coliseum cages.

[Keith]

Did anyone else pick up a certain sense of moral superiority here, and that the authors are using a rhetorical device to make themselves out the be the humble, oppressed underdogs?

A sense of moral superiority and rhetorical assumption of oppressed minority status are, if not fundamental to the Evangelical world view, common enough to be listed as identifying characteristics, along with the creeping homobigotry and conjoined attachment to the GOP platform, as discussed here at length. In other words: that's a feature, not a bug. While it may not be universally true of all Evangelicals (take Fred, for example) it's common enough to get mixed in with the basic assumptions, like the anti-gay marriage and anti-choice stances that are taken as a given later in the manifesto.

Part of this is the general rhetorical tone of a manifesto. They're all slightly bombastic and written from the point of view of delineating a new set of truths to the uninformed (check out the first Surrealist Manifesto by Andre Breton for some real purple prose). But part of it is the nature of religious group. They feel as if they have a received vision of truth that they are supposed to bring to the world, come Hell or high water. Plus it's written by people used to speaking from a stage at people below their line of sight.

[Tonio]

Keith, the characteristics you describe might really apply to the fundamentalist and Bible-literalist subsets of the Evangelical community. The media often assumes that Evangelicals are both theologically conservative and politically conservative, ignoring believers like Fred. This assumption seems to blind media to the divides in the Evangelical community over issues like secularism and global warming. I suspect Fred is right that the Manifesto's authors are trying to appeal to both sides of the divide, like a party leader trying to hold a fragile coalition together. I'd like to know if the divide is a theological one and not just a political one. Is the difference as simple as one side having a less absolutist version of a "received vision of truth"?

[Froborr]

Man, this manifesto and thread are just full of bogeymen, aren't they?

Why, exactly, are Evangelicals threatened by a couple of artistic movements? I mean, modernism is basically dead and post-modernism has joined the toolbox -- everybody uses it on occasion, but hardly anyone considers themselves a "post-modernist" anymore. Even at their peaks, though, they were artistic movements, with about as much relevance to what people do and believe as the latest trends in piecrust.*

Next up, moral relativism. I've posted about this before; moral relativism is not the same as amorality. Moral relativism is the belief that morality is personally and culturally constructed -- it is a matter of point of view, hence the "relativism". As a moral relativist, I can and do say "I believe so-and-so is wrong," and I can and do act on that belief. At the same time, I remain humble in the face of the complexity and variety of life; what seems wrong to me from here might seem right if I wore someone else's shoes for a while. It's not for me to judge or try to change people. If they get in the way of what I believe is right I'll oppose them, but unless I see strong evidence to the contrary I'm going to assume that they're doing what they believe is right, and I'll respect that even as I oppose their actions.

*I helped make a postmodernist pie once. It wasn't intentionally pomo; it was supposed to be a pear pie with a graham cracker crust. Except we had no idea how to make a graham cracker crust, so we guessed (result was tasty but bore no relation to graham cracker crust). And there weren't a lot of pears, so we put in peaches and frozen berries. Then we realized the pears were bad, so we didn't put them in.

[Froborr]

@kodiak:

me: Are your skills average or above average?
them: average

I find it very hard to believe you've found someone who gives any answer to that question other than "above average."

[alsafi]

Froborr, that pie sounds kinda awesome. Better than my two story-worthy pies--the peanut-butter-chocolate-turpentine pie made by a friend (it had to be refrigerated to set up after being put together, and his roommate thoughtfully put an open can of leather stain in the refrigerator with it. Overnight. It was a good pie, other than the turpentine, but really the same could be said of any pie), and the first apple pie I ever made all by myself, where the apples were so undercooked (but tasty) that a friend over for dinner asked what kind of pie it was and we told her it was baby pie, in such normal tones that it took her a few seconds--and another bite of pie--to move past "oh, well, it's good" to "wait, what?!"

[Jeff Eaton]

My reaction to the same document was more than a little cynicism. North American Evangelicals have spent a few decades shouting that Conservative Republicans Love Jesus and Lib'rals Hate Him. Now the world is topsy-turvy, with a conservative candidate who won't talk about his faith publicly and liberals who explain the way faith shapes their policy. How convenient that said evangelicals choose this moment to announce that tying faith to politics is bad, bad, bad.

[Tonio]

moral relativism is not the same as amorality...

While your argument is excellent, it may be lost on fundamentalists who insist that humans aren't capable of any type of moral judgment without consequences imposed from without. Any ideas on overcoming that barrier?

[Froborr]

I can't get the manifesto to open (a pox on PDFs!), but this quote from the main page gets my goat:

As an open declaration, An Evangelical Manifesto addresses not only Evangelicals and other Christians but other American citizens and people of all other faiths in America, including those who say they have no faith.

Because, of course, nobody is *really* an atheist, they just claim to be. Also, I really don't like the use of "faith" as a synonym for "religion". Every major world religion except Christianity considers "works" vastly more important than faith, to the point of not even recognizing any kind of dichotomy between them. Using the peculiar emphasis of Christian religion as the term for all religions smacks of offensive ignorance at best, imperialism at worst -- it would be like a Jew calling all religions "covenants" or a Muslim calling all religions "submissions".

[Keith]

Tonio: strap them down Clockwork Orange style for a lecture on general semantics and elementary logic.

[Jeff]

some poor sap cleaning up lion shit in the Coliseum cages

Or some poor sap becoming lion shit...

[kodiak]

@Froborr

"I find it very hard to believe you've found someone who gives any answer to that question other than "above average.""

Well, they mostly know me, and realize that I will ask for proof of such a claim. i.e. "So if you think that you have skills above average (enough to potentially bump you into the next "class"), why aren't you using those skills now?"

When they realize they can't just say "I'm the greatest thing since sliced bread!" without a challenge that will make them look ridiculous... well they don't bother going there. (It's also possible that there's an issue involving feminism/patriarchial values here since most of the people I'm speaking to are women, and women are often taught not to put themselves "forward" like that)

[Hawker Hurricane]

Funny, IIRC the person who started the "recovered memories of past lives" movement was Bridey Murphy, who was (allegedly) a poor Irish girl from Dublin who starved to death during a famine. So why all these people who in past lives were rich/famous/important?

(I don't remember much about my past lives except my last words. "I've never seen a ballista before, what do they do?" comes to mind.)

[Chris]

@Froborr: thank you for defending moral relativism!

And a very interesting point about the Christianocentrism of using "faith" as synonymous with "religion", too.

[Froborr]

Tonio: While your argument is excellent, it may be lost on fundamentalists who insist that humans aren't capable of any type of moral judgment without consequences imposed from without. Any ideas on overcoming that barrier?

Other than the childish "Maybe you're not," no, not really. Fortunately, I feel no compulsion to do so. I don't have to convince everyone in the world that I'm right. Actually, I don't have to convince *anyone* that I'm right, so long as enough people agree with me about what to do that we can get it done.

Thanks for the complement, by the way.

[Izzy]

My answer to the "wouldn't it be great to live in Days of Yore" people is generally:

"So...you ever had a root canal?"

[Tonio]

I don't have to convince everyone in the world that I'm right. Actually, I don't have to convince *anyone* that I'm right, so long as enough people agree with me about what to do that we can get it done.

I don't see this as about me being right about anything. Instead, I'm concerned that the implications of the fundamentalist view of humanity. It seems to negate not just secularism but humanism, science, individual conscience, and ultimately democracy. All those fields involve humans making informed conclusions about the world around them. Fundamentalism seems to be hostile to that concept, suggesting that humans either aren't capable of that or shouldn't be doing that, or both. While most closed systems of thought take the same position, most cannot match fundamentalism's political power and influence. From your posts, you probably agree with most of that. I'm suggesting that one way of protecting humanism and the other fields might be weakening the basis of fundamentalism. Is there a better approach?

[Tonio]

"So...you ever had a root canal?"

I can't remember the name or author, but I remember an SF story where an alien race's spaceships did not have indoor plumbing or air circulation, and the race still used flintlocks. It turned out that the hyperdrive principle was so easily discovered that most races focused exclusively on that to the detriment of other technology. For whatever reason, the human race missed discovering it and was the most technologically advanced race.

[Jon]

"So...you ever had a root canal?"

Personally, I've gone with, "Yeah, Small Pox was awesome."
Of course, I've encountered people who get very angry in response to this, as, obviously they're not denying that medical/technological advances are good things, and that I'm totally missing the point, which is that the culture/values/morals/whatever were better in the past. I then try to point out that medical/technological advances are inextricably linked with changes in the culture/values/morals/whatever, but that seems to go right past them.
It all makes me long for simpler times...

There is a scene from Star Trek: Generations where Captain Picard longs for the 'good old days' of "Tall ships and a star to steer her by". Commander Riker points out the dangers of scurvy, ricketts, salt pork and watered rum...

Tonio: "The Road Not Taken". I can't remember the author. And I read it in a short story collection that I can't remember the name of.
(spoiler)

I can remember the alien's shock when thier troops (armed with matchlocks, pikes, and supported by smoothbore cannon) are confronted by California National Guardsmen with M-16 assault rifles, M-60 tanks, and supported by F-16 fighter bombers...

[Hawker Hurricane]

Found it! Harry Turtledove wrote it.

(It's good to work in a library.)

Oh, the 0:54 comment was me, too.

[Hawker Hurricane]

Let us try this again.
That was me at 3:54 and 3:45.

Why does it not save my name?

[Ursula L]

Hawker Hurricane,

Are you using the Preview feature? I find that if I preview, typepad forgetts my name and e-mail.

[Hawker Hurricane]

Not using preview. It just won't save my name from post to post.

[McJulie]

Also, I really don't like the use of "faith" as a synonym for "religion".

Neither do I. I also don't like the way "belief in a principle" and "belief that a thing is factually correct" are conflated in current discourse. Both together lead to a weird equivalency, where faith = belief = think is factual. Which explains a lot about creationists, I think. They talk about "faith" in evolution as if that's a meaningful concept.

culture/values/morals/whatever were better in the past.

I have seen this called a "declensionist" view of history. It is one of the more bipartisan fallacies, since there are common versions found in both liberal and conservative circles. Conservatives tend to see moral decay in terms of loss of traditional social roles and taboos, while liberals are likely to be alarmed by an alleged increase in violence/callousness/materialism.

[cjmr]

If the time period was ancient Rome, they imagine themselves as an emperor, instead of some poor sap cleaning up lion shit in the Coliseum cages.

As opposed to being lion shit?

...darnit! Jeff beat me to the punchline. When you're watching four children in addition to homeschooling your own, you only get to hit the refresh key very occasionally.

BTW (and totally off topic) my friend's baby is home from the hospital, having recovered from whatever virus it was he had. The anti-virals were (fortunately) effective against it. (That's whose house I'm at and whose other four children I'm periodically watching.)

[Izzy]

Jon: Yeah, plus the awesome values...aren't.

Without even getting into such lovely traditions as human sacrifice, slavery, and factory towns...I *like* that I don't have to get married, or be with a guy I'm going to marry, in order to have sex; I like that most men I know treat me like one of the guys, and thus someone whose opinions on politics and, um, video games they respect; I like that I can do what I want, when I want, for the most part, without the entire town making it its business...

These are all Good Things, in my book. And that's part of my real problem communicating with fundies. Most people, even fiscal conservatives, want basically the same thing I do, but we have different ideas of how to get there. Fundies and social conservatives? They want to end up in an entirely different universe. One where nobody has any fun. Fuck that noise. There's not much room for dialogue there.

[Amaryllis]

cjmr: good to know, thanks for the update.
And not really off-topic -- let's hear it for modern medicine.

[R. Mildred]

"Tolerance of Intolerance is bigotry" is the phrase I generally use, along with "so why do I have to be tolerant of your hate while you don't have to be tolerant of my love?"

I like them.

[Dash]

Re "faith" as a synonym for "religion": all points very well taken, and there's an added feature for evangelicals. Evangelicals often use "religion" as a contrast to their very own "personal relationship with Jesus." So one can be very religious (e.g., Catholic, Buddhist, whatever), but not really truly Christian, i.e., RTC (TM).

Jon: Of course, I've encountered people who get very angry in response to this, as, obviously they're not denying that medical/technological advances are good things, and that I'm totally missing the point, which is that the culture/values/morals/whatever were better in the past. I then try to point out that medical/technological advances are inextricably linked with changes in the culture/values/morals/whatever, but that seems to go right past them.
It all makes me long for simpler times...

Just for the record, splurting hot coffee all over a keyboard actually helps clean out some of the doghair that gets trapped in there.

Empirical testing. Good stuff.

[Jon]

Izzy: Yeah, plus the awesome values...aren't.

This is true, and pointing this out is a tack I've also taken when confronted with the idea of a past Golden Age. It doesn't work, largely because, to many people, notions of injustices like slavery, the oppression of women, and so forth, are too abstract and too distant and removed from their vision of reality (even though in actual reality they are not all distant or removed).
Basically, they view them as unfortunate but not too unfortunate facts of life that could be overlooked in exchange for the perceived benefits that were part of the glorious days of yore.

[Doctor Science]

Maybe it has something to do with the desert origins of all three religions.

I doubt this *extremely*.

In the first place, the desert is thousands of years behind the great majority of actual believers in any of those religions. I don't think it would be so important to people now unless it was really important to their lives *now*.

In the second place, I have no reason to suppose that Hinduism or other non-desert religions aren't also obsessed with gender norms.

I fear it's the case that Sigmund Freud was right (I *hate* that), and that sexuality is so basic to our sense of *self* and our place in the world that any truly important issue is subconsciously interpreted as sexual, and visa verse.

And/or it may be that changes in gender roles are so fundamentally threatening to a lot of people that it creates a profound, existential-level angst, which only religion can assuage. Amanda at Pandagon (who is strongly atheist) thinks that sexism is intrinsically irrational and so it *must* get support from religion, because it's not going to get it anywhere else. I think she's probably over-generalizing, but it's a possibility.

[Amaryllis]

I thought this, from page 5, was interesting:

"Equally, we do not typically lead with the name Evangelical in public."
They don't? since when? Why on earth not?

"We are simply Christians, or followers of Jesus, or adherents of 'mere Christianity,' but the Evangelical principle is the heart of how we see and live our faith."

This may not be intended to imply that those Christians who don't call themselves Evangelical are some kind of hyphenated-Christian, something added to the pure model, but that's how I read it first glance.

[Amaryllis]

Doctor Science: I don't know about Freud, but it certainly seems to be true that a self-identification as male or female is one of the most profound parts of our sense of personhood. It goes deeper that any racial, national or religious classifications. Which is not to say that we wouldn't side with our compatriots or co-religionists in a conflict; "the war between the sexes" happens within those kinds of boundaries rather than across them. But I still think that most people identify as "I am a woman/man" before "I am X nationality. Y religion, Z ethnicity."

Perhaps because it's the least mutable of those qualities. Nationality and religion are independent of physical characteristics; racial and ethnic categories are fluid, more culturally defined than biologically.

Although gender is biological (for most people), gender roles are not. But because they're so closely identified with those biological categories, it's easy to confound biology and culture. So yes, a change in gender roles does require an adjustment in one's thinking patterns. This is harder for those people who tend to believe, either through dogma or inexperience, that "the way things are now is the way they've always been," or "there's only one way that's right for everybody."

Amanda at Pandagon (who is strongly atheist) thinks that sexism is intrinsically irrational and so it *must* get support from religion, because it's not going to get it anywhere else.
Yeah, over-generalizing. "Religious" doesn't have to equal "irrational."
"Religious" doesn't have to equal "sexist."
And sometimes it seems as if sexism gets support from just about everywhere else.

[Amaryllis]

Back to the document, another "labeling" question.

from page 10-11:
"Yet it is clear that the term Evangelical, and the desire to be biblical, both predate and outlast the Protestant project in its historical form...the term Protestant is more and more limited to a historical period. "

Asking as an outsider, is the term "Protestant" no longer meaningful? Is "the Protestant project" a thing of the past? Has the meaning of the word been reduced to a negative definition: not-Catholic/not-Orthodox?

[Raj]

Izzy: Fundies and social conservatives? They want to end up in an entirely different universe. One where nobody has any fun.

Absence of sex is supposed to be one of the good things about Fundie Heaven!

----------

One of the most ridiculous manifestations of "Good Old Days" thinking is the In-our-glorious-past-we-were-kings-and-queens claim that some African-Americans have made. (Let me be quite clear that I am very much in favor of studying and appreciating the histories and cultures of Africa; what I am deriding is the idea that any part of the world could ever have had an era in which everyone was some sort of king or queen.)

[dr ngo]

As a historian, I have little sympathy with the idea that the Good Old Days were just that, much less with the idea that we are all descended from, or reincarnations of, rulers and gentlefolk.

OTOH, there is one limited aspect of this speculation that continues to intrigue me from time to time. GRANTED, first, that past ages were lacking in technological advances (including medicine, communications, &c.) that we would miss horribly. GRANTED, secondly, that those groups who enjoyed relative leisure and abundance - Athenian citizens, Chinese mandarins, English gentry, Southern plantation owners, &c - did so upon an economic base that necessarily entailed enormous exploitation. (Not that our leisure and abundance today is exploitation-free, globally, I hasten to add.)

Within these constraints, however, we can still ask of some such elite group: were their aspects of how they lived that were in some way more desirable than the way we (generally) live? Were they more "civilized"? Better able to relax, to be creative (poetry, art), to communicate with each other in complete sentences? Better, in general, at expressing disagreement with civility? More committed to "family values" in the true (non-political) sense of the word? More appreciative of nature, of each other? More thoughtful, philosophical?

IF - and it's a giant hypothetical, of course - the answer to any of these questions is "Yes," then the response should not (Not, NOT) be to claim that their society as a whole was "better" than ours, and we should try somehow to turn back the clock. That way, as many have pointed out above, madness lies.

Rather, the ideal would be to say, "OK, in their specific historical [outmoded, exploitative] niche they managed to be, say, more creative and considerate than we are. What were the specific conditions/circumstances - OTHER than having serfs in the fields and servants at the table - that made this possible? And is there any way that we might be able to replicate some of these conditions or circumstances so that we would have a better chance of increasing our creativity and consideration?"

This, it seems to me, is a "thought experiment" that could actually be useful - or at least diverting - without succumbing to the Romantic Retrograde fallacy. At the least it should help inoculate us from the equally pernicious Myth Of Progress, that everything, including our manners, our morals, and our aesthetic sensibility, is better Now than in the wretched Past.

[Dash]

It looks like part of what is going on here, both in terms of the statement that they do not "lead with the name Evangelical," that they are "simply Christians," and with the relegation of "Protestant" to a more limited meaning, is an attempt to counteract the notion of "mainstream Protestant." Traditionally, "mainstream Protestants" were regarded by Evangelicals as liberals, and Evangelicals were a more or less marginal type of Protestant. However, now that Evangelicals are prominent, as well (I think) as numerically superior, this statement seems to be positioning them as the new mainstream--not, of course, that they're going to use that term. But the way they describe Evangelicalism is meant to signal that it is the default form of Protestant Christianity. "Mainstream" Protestantism is given the name "Protestant" ("mainstream" won't do, as it carries with it the notion of centrality) and relegated to limited and historical use.

[Dash]

Re religion and a veritable mania for gender roles:

Gerda Lerner argues that the notion of very specific and tightly controlled gender roles developed in the context of the rise of agriculture, and that most religions either are created or take on their modern form during that time, as well--that is, the religions that tell people how to get along in cities and other sizeable social groups. Hence the tendency for religions to incorporate fairly heavy-duty strictures on gendered behavior--it was presumably part of the whole development of religion as an institution that goes beyond the tribe into organized early states. Associating the rise of modern religions with the rise of agriculture means that the development of the practice of extensive private property goes along with the development of the interest in controlling female sexuality.

Disclosure: I haven't fully read Lerner's argument and don't have the academic chops to tell just how much water it holds, although the idea seems pretty interesting. And since all of my past lives during that time seem to have been lived as a series of sea slugs, field mice, and, on at least two occasions, a particularly annoying flea, I'm afraid I missed the chance to pay attention to the rise of agriculture and what it meant for the higher animals.

[Turcano]

From what I remember from my anthropology class, there are very well-defined gender roles in every society, even those who subsist on foraging. Agriculture may have intensified the importance of these roles, but it sure as hell didn't create them. And culture seems to have a far greater impact on these roles than religion does; as a textbook example, Anglo-Saxon women were comparatively free (though not equal to men) until the Normans came, even though England was mostly Christianized by that point (this is an aspect that they apparently shared with the Norse, who became Christianized much later).

[alfgifu]

@ dr ngo, on the Myth of Progress

The only thing that really annoyed me about the recent Beowulf film was how gobsmackingly more sexist it managed to be than the C6th-C10th poem it is purportedly based on. Beowulf the poem has a number of female characters, most of whom are 'good' women who act as peace-weavers between warring tribes. Not only is there a digression at one point which explores what a rough deal the women get in the process, but Grendel's Mother (one of the main three monsters) is the most sympathetic of antagonists the poet provides, whose motivation is avenging the death of her son. The poet(s) are very aware of her sexuality as well - her grappling fight with Beowulf includes a moment when she straddles the hero and stabs down at him with her dagger which has left immature students sniggering for centuries. She's never described as beautiful, though, that just isn't important - she's one of the more interesting characters in the poem.

In the film, Grendel's Mother is rendered as Angelina Jolie wearing nothing but gold paint, a sort of sultry siren whose role is to demonstrate how evil women seduce and destroy good men. She doesn't get to fight Beowulf on equal terms, or appeal for audience sympathy.

On the link between agriculture and gender roles - well, Beowulf was composed by a Christian poet(s) in a society based on agriculture and trade, set amongst the upper crust of an explicitly non-Christian heroic past society. I'm not sure what that says. The (probably) earlier national epic, the Irish Tain, has even more active and sympathetic female figures (i.e. Medb, Queen of Ulster, the only women in history to halt a battle mid-fight because 'she got her gush of blood', to which her lover Fergus replied with the immortal words 'you picked a bad moment for it'). The much later Chanson de Roland, on the other hand, is a Manly Tale for Manly Men.

[alfgifu]

@ Turcano - snap! Quick point though - the Norse were Christianised around the time of the Norman conquest, not much later (though certainly later than the Anglo-Saxons, if that's what you meant).

[Turcano]

Yeah, that is what I meant; England had been completely Christian for over 200 years, and missionary work had started 200 years before that.

[Amaryllis]

Turcano: From what I remember from my anthropology class, there are very well-defined gender roles in every society
Very true. But the specifics of those roles could and did vary from culture to culture. "Men's work" in one place could be "women's work" in another. There was nothing inevitable in the assignment of a task or social role to one sex or the other (beyond the obvious "women care for nursing babies"). And while men generally held the overt political power, barring the odd queen or such, the women's personal freedom of action also varied considerably from culture to culture, as alfgifu points out.

Fundamentalist ideas about the inherent natures of men and women, and the consequences of those ideas for the lives of all men and all women, are based on their own cultural inheritance, which they generalize to "Natual Law" and "God's Will."

And alfgifu, good points about Beowulf. I didn't see the movie, although some in my house insisted on going, because it sounded like a terrible travesty of a really good poem.

[Amaryllis]

Turcano: Um, that should have been "as you and alfgifu point out."
In the same post I was responding to. It's too early in the morning for this.

[alfgifu]

@ Amaryllis - the film is a bizarre mixture of very good scholarship and utterly pointless butchering of the poem. Clearly someone had read up on Beowulf - it handles the whole tension between the pre-Christian and Christian worldviews really well, IMO, and someone knows that Wealtheow is probably supposed to be foreign/exotic. On the other hand, aside from the aforementioned travesty of Grendel's Mother, there's the fact that Beowulf fights Grendel in the nude, dignity preserved by various bits of hall furnishing/weaponry that handily conceal anything a PG audience shouldn't see. It's like a misplaced scene from Austin Powers. Utterly (unintentionally) hilarious. It's probably worth seeing the film for that scene alone.

[Amaryllis]

alfgifu: thanks. I'll have to re-think my boycott.

Also, Beowulf the poem has a number of female characters, most of whom are 'good' women who act as peace-weavers between warring tribes. Not only is there a digression at one point which explores what a rough deal the women get in the process...
I always wondered about all those treaties sealed with a dynastic marriage. What happened to the women when the alliance failed, as it so often did? You'd end up with your husband at war with your father, your son at war with your sister's son: it can't have made for a happy home life.