slacktivist

Evangelicals and immigration

On the one hand, you've got your religious evangelicals. They're born-again Christians who go to church twice every Sunday, read their daily devotions, try not to say "geez" because that's almost just as bad as swearing, feel guilty that they haven't done more to witness to you because they genuinely don't want you to go to Hell, and they just really Lord they just really just pray, Lord, all the time that, Lord, Jesus would just really just guide their daily lives.

We're talking about Ned Flanders. Nice folks. I like them a lot. I mean, I wouldn't want them designing the science curriculum for my kids' school, and I almost never vote for the same people they vote for, but those things aren't these folks' main focus. They're mainly about serving Jesus as their personal Lord and savior and trying to get others to do the same.

On the other hand, you've got your political evangelicals. On paper, these people look very similar to the Ned Flanders types. The difference is what they regard as paramount, as most important. For your political evangelicals, who you vote for and what is taught in science class is all that really matters. They may go to the same church as Ned, and they may attend just as often, but when push comes to shove that religious stuff isn't nearly as important to them as the pride and power of politics.

For a quick and easy illustration of the difference between these two groups, ask either one about immigration policy.

For religious evangelicals, immigration is looked at through the lens of two centuries of the missionary movement. Immigration, they believe, brings the mission field home. The categories of documented and undocumented are irrelevant in this view. The only categories that matter are saved and unsaved. Unsaved immigrants are a field white unto harvest. And saved immigrants are brothers and sisters in Christ. The former should be considered the focus of evangelism, the latter of fellowship.

Hence the existence, dating back to the 19th century, of evangelical "home mission societies" which have long helped to settle refugees and newly arrived immigrants, helping them find housing and learn the language and customs of their new home. And the existence, also, of ethnic immigrant congregations -- often called "missionary" churches -- sharing facilities with established English-speaking congregations.

This piece in today's Chicago Tribune nicely captures the attitude toward immigration that arises from a primarily religious evangelicalism.

The discussion within Wheaton Chinese Alliance Church reflects a shift among the nation's evangelical community as more pastors push for comprehensive immigration reform. In recent years, many influential evangelical leaders have moved from silent opposition to outspoken support for immigration reform, citing biblical foundations and Christian duty to care for strangers.

Last month, the National Association of Evangelicals, which represents about 45,000 U.S. churches, called on the Obama administration to establish a process by which undocumented immigrants could earn legal status. NAE President Leith Anderson said the group recognized the surging number of immigrants, mainly Latino and Asian, filling evangelical churches. ...

Matthew Soerens, immigration counselor at World Relief DuPage and co-author of the book Welcoming the Stranger: Justice, Compassion and Truth in the Immigration Debate, said the stronger support for reform is due to the realization that immigrants are changing the face of the American evangelical church.

"We see this as a biblical issue grounded in the Scriptures, and primary to what we believe," Soerens said. "But what is also true is the demographics of our country is changing with immigration, and evangelical leaders realize that the fastest growth they are experiencing is among immigrant congregations."

Two of the largest evangelical churches in the area, Willow Creek Community Church in South Barrington and Wheaton Bible Church in West Chicago, now have Spanish-speaking congregations and support immigration reform. ...

That's interesting. Here in America, "evangelical Christian" almost unfailingly also means "Republican," and the Republican Party is adamantly opposed to the sort of liberalized immigration reform being endorsed by these religious evangelicals.

That conflict hasn't gone unnoticed by the political evangelicals. Professional douchebag Mark Tooley -- whose job as president of the Institute on Religion and Democracy is to politicize American Christianity for the benefit of the right-wing foundations that fund IRD -- denounced the religious evangelicals at the NAE and elsewhere for failing to adhere to a strict Lou-Dobbs, xenophobic, Tea Party chauvinist, barbarians-at-the-gate party line scapegoating of immigrants.

"Several NAE members have denied endorsing the immigration resolution. Did the stance actually emerge from NAE's constituency? Or was it simply 'handed down from on-high' by NAE elites?

"This controversy is not only about immigration policy ... It is also about NAE's increasing politicization and elitism, a dangerous trajectory veering towards irrelevancy and pioneered by the National Council of Churches."

The NAE's position on immigration arises directly and organically from its religious perspective. Tooley's position on immigration arises directly and inevitably from his partisan politics. How they each respond is a function of what each regards as most important -- what drives them and shapes their identity.

For the Ned-Flanders types, that essential identity has to do with their Christian piety. That's why religious evangelicals are such nice people and why they make excellent next-door neighbors.

For the Mark-Tooley types, that essential identity has to do with their anything-to-win grasping after partisan power. That's why political evangelicals are such despicable assholes.

Defying gravity

I need help from people who know more than I do about science -- in particular about gravity and what we do or don't know about how it works.

What I'm trying to do is to find another angle for breaking through the protective shell that makes communication with "creationists" almost impossible. Some of my best friends, as the saying goes, are creationists, and it isn't good for them. It warps their faith and it puts them on the wrong side of a dangerous anti-science trend that affects a wide range of very important things, from climate change to vaccination* to the insane notion that the middle of a global recession is a smart time to start aggressively worrying about budget deficits.

When people stop finding science persuasive, when they distrust it precisely because it is science, then they become vulnerable to all sorts of Really Bad Ideas.

But anyway, I'm pretty well-equipped to engage my creationist friends and relatives on some of the other layers of their anti-science belief system. I can articulate a capable critique of their illiteralist hermeneutic and the way it vivisects the opening chapters of Genesis and transforms them into something unintended and antibiblical. And I'm pretty good at addressing their notion that Christian faith rests entirely on the basis of a modernistic "literal" interpretation of every verse of scripture, meaning that their world will crumble if Noah's Ark can't be found on Ararat because that would mean that Jesus doesn't really love us.

On the biblical and theological side, in other words, I can speak their language. I'm fluent in the idioms, allusions, connotations and quirks of evangelicalese.

But when I'm addressing the "science" aspects of "scientific creationism" I find I'm unable to communicate with them -- not just because I'm less fluent in the language of science, but because when they start talking about science then words no longer seem to mean what they mean for the rest of us. They use familiar-sounding words, but you quickly realize that they're using these familiar words in unfamiliar ways, using them to communicate vastly, irreconcilably different things.

The most common and frustrating example of this is probably the way creationists talk about a "scientific theory." This seems to mean, for creationists, something like, "a wild, uneducated guess unsupported by evidence that can be dismissed and ignored without consequence," with additional overtones of "a conspiracy to deceive and corrupt the youth of America."

I heard these words used this way a few nights ago in a BBC radio story following a group of fundamentalist Christian middle school students as they toured a museum of natural history, itching for a fight with the evolutionist scientists running the place. "Why won't you admit that evolution is just a theory?" their teacher said to the scientist leading the tour.

And then, to hammer the point home, he added, "It's not like gravity."

Aha. So here we come to where I need some help from actual science types. Because it strikes me that the teacher is sort of right about that, but just not in the way he thinks. Gravity is also "just" a theory -- but if I understand these things properly, it's a theory with some serious problems. Like that it doesn't work at the atomic level and that it gets a bit wibbly wobbly when trying to explain the behavior of astronomically large things as well.

The comparison with gravity, it seems to me, underscores the comparative strength of evolution. I think it might be helpful to point that out when our creationist friends, inevitably, start going on about the alleged shortcomings and flaws of the justatheory of evolution.

So what I'd like to be able to say to them would be something like this:

Well, OK then, but gravity is justatheory too, the way you're using that word. And gravity, as justatheory, has much bigger unresolved problems than the justatheory of evolution does. If we took your standards for evaluating the justatheory of evolution and applied those standards to gravity, then we'd have to conclude that the justatheory of gravity is even more wrong.

So, a little help from you science types, please. Does that work? Is it a fair/accurate line of argument? Does it need to be qualified? Amended? Embellished? Abandoned? Please let me know.

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* Yeah, I'm talking about you, Bill Maher (via). The Real Time comic has become a self-appointed advocate for the spread of H1N1 and of seasonal flu.

Here I would remind us, again, of Wendell Berry's distinction between religion and superstition. Religion, Berry said, is belief in something which cannot be disproved. Superstition, on the other hand, is belief in something that has been disproved. The former can be reasonable, the latter cannot. For all of Bill Maher's railing against religion as "mere superstition," it seems he doesn't understand either of those ideas. His latest anti-vaccine, anti-medicine, anti-science crusade is superstitious nonsense. It's religulous.

Apocalypseses

Author Tom Sine tells a story about his first encounter with Ron Sider's book, Rich Christians in an Age of Hunger. It made him mad.

Sider's book suggested that money was a major theme of the Bible. Tom knew better. He had read the Bible. He read it every day. Like any good evangelical, he had committed big chunks of it to memory. It might mention money a handful of times, but mainly it was about other things, stuff like sin and lust and idols and praying and what not.

So Tom went back to his Bible, angrily, setting out to disprove Sider's claims. And suddenly he noticed something he had never noticed before. Money is a major theme of the Bible. It's everywhere in that book. And the Bible, it turns out, has far more things to say far more often about the poor than it does about, say for instance, sex.

This was a revelation. One biblical word for such a revelation, such a pulling back of the veil, is "apocalypse." That which had been hidden is revealed and the whole world is changed, remade, replaced, reborn.

Tom Sine had the grace to welcome this apocalypse, to embrace it. But not every reader is receptive to such revelations.

I suspect that a similar apocalypse lies behind the creation of the Conservative Bible Project. Someone caught a fleeting glimpse of what that book has to say when read without the filtering lens of what it is expected to say. It may even have been, as in Tom Sine's story, an angry attempt to disprove what some radical prophet was claiming it said. However it happened, for a moment the veil was lifted and there it was -- the law and the prophets, the sheep and the goats, the stark binary clarity of 1 John and that pervasive, terrifying, overwhelming insistence that nothing else matters to God if we fail to respond to neighbors in need with a tangible expression of love.

This revelation was unwelcome.

The folks at Conservapedia wanted no part in the new world promised by this apocalypse. Their response to it, instead, was something like a scene from Douglas Adams:

They flew out of the cloud.

They saw the staggering jewels of the night in their infinite dust and their minds sang with fear.

For a while they flew on, motionless against the starry sweep of the Galaxy, itself motionless against the infinite sweep of the Universe. And then they turned round.

"It'll have to go."

The folks at the Conservative Bible Project caught a glimpse of something too big to accommodate in their tiny little comfortable framework and so, unable to accept it or even to allow or recognize it, they've set about turning it into something else.

It's an audacious project for a group of people who self-identify not just as Christians, but as "Bible-believing" Christians (that is, Real, True Christians) -- people who proudly differentiate themselves by declaring their "high view of scripture." The only way to reconcile that sense of identity with the project of rewriting the Bible is to pretend that their problem is not with the Bible itself, but with the supposed distortion of it perpetrated by evil, feminist, intellectual, tree-hugging, gay-loving, baby-killing, liberal translators.

Correct that distortion and the problem will go away and that scary glimpse of whatever it was they thought they saw there for a moment when the veil was lifted will cease to haunt their sleep. A bit of "retranslation" and they can be rid of that liberal notion that loving one's neighbor encapsulates the whole of the law and the prophets.

Among the many humorous aspects of this undertaking is the CBP organizers' confidence that this project will be easy. They hope to harness the power of wiki to quickly produce a new translation. An army of homeschoolers, they are convinced, should be able to accomplish this in a matter of months.

Some of those footsoldiers may well work as quickly as they imagine. The gruntwork of the Berlitz barbarism they have in mind as "translation" doesn't require much thought or care. And this project is easier than most translation, because the translators already know ahead of time what it is they're going to make the text say.

But I also think that army of homeschoolers is going to have more than a few deserters. I suspect this project will, for many, become a matter of a little learning being a dangerous thing. Alps on alps arise, and apocalypse upon apocalypse. The text will speak for itself. It's not going to lose this fight. The Conservative Bible Project, I suspect, will come to work as a subversive virus, creating far more converts from than to its cause.

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As for the redundancy of satire in this case, which we discussed in the previous post, I'm not yet willing to surrender. The ridiculous must be ridiculed. That is part of our sacred duty to the truth, and not to do so is to sin by omission.

When something like the CBP comes along and we realize the impossibility of outracing it, of getting ahead of its own headlong pursuit of absurd conclusions, then we are obliged to ridicule it by creating a parallel track, starting a new line of thought alongside it.

The most fitting response to the Conservative Bible Project thus might be something like the Conservative Shakespeare Project. The words of the Bard, after all, have also been tainted by the hands of devious liberal translators (and actors) and thus will also need to be remade, re-edited and rewritten to ensure that they are fully compatible with the pro-market, anti-government perspective of the Conservapedia.

We clearly need a new folio in which, for example, the quality of mercy is strained.

Inevitable

The American right wing's ability to make parody redundant has gone from being a bitter joke to being a bitter cliché. It's an observation so frequently made because it's so frequently true.

For an astonishingly explicit example of this, check out the Conservative Bible Project* at Conservapedia. Yes, that's right, they've decided the Bible will have to be rewritten due to its obvious liberal bias.

This requires a closer look precisely because of that old joke about the irrelevance of satire.

Consider what that joke means. Satire works by exaggeration, but it can't be arbitrary exaggeration. It's only effective (or funny) when it adheres to the trajectory of the idea it lampoons. The target of satire offers a series of points in succession and the satirist ridicules these ideas by continuing down that line, racing ahead to the next logical points in the established progression and demonstrating the inherent absurdity of those ideas by taking them to their logical -- and necessary -- extreme conclusions.

The satirist and the extremist are thus in a kind of footrace. And, as the Conservative Bible Project demonstrates, the extremists these days are winning. They're getting there first -- beating any would-be satirist to the finish line and the punch line.

Thus we have Poe's Law, which states, "Without a winking smiley or other blatant display of humor, it is impossible to create a parody of fundamentalism that someone won't mistake for the real thing." The Internet provides dozens of illustrations of this, Web sites that come to function, simultaneously, as parodies and as earnest expressions of the beliefs of extremists. The intent of those sites' creators may not even matter because, if the satirist is doing her job well, she will wind up at precisely the same point further along the trajectory at which the extremist will, sooner or later, arrive. Or vice versa. To paraphrase Flannery O'Connor, all that descends into absurdity must converge.

The CBP is a fine example of this. It reads like parody, even though it isn't. It presents an exaggerated, extreme view, but that extremism and exaggeration is not the product of a satirist's mockery. This makes it unintentionally funny but also, more importantly, it makes the CBP useful as a herald of what is to come. Soon. The CBP illustrates the inevitable destiny of the religious right. This is where things are headed, where things are going, possibly faster than you expect.

Observe Christianity Today, the moderate mainstream of evangelical America. Draw a point to represent that perspective. Now observe Dr. James Dobson, broadcasting his right-wing nuttiness on more than a thousand radio stations. Draw another point there. (Those two points aren't that close together, but we're not concerned here with distance as much as with direction.) Dobson's ultimatum led Sen. John McCain to select abdicated Alaska Gov. Sarah Palin as his running mate. Palin quickly became a revered spokesperson for Christian conservatives. So draw a third point there for Sarah Palin.

Now we have three points, so now we can be sure. Get a ruler and connect the dots. Start with CT and keep going past Dobson, past Palin, and see where it takes you. This is the trajectory. This is the direction in which things are headed. Dobson looks like a parody of CT and Palin looks like a parody of Dobson, but these aren't parodies, simply slightly more extreme, exaggerated forms of the same ideas, further down the line.

And if one continues along that same line, then one eventually has to try to rewrite the Bible. It may be a bit surprising that the folks at Conservapedia are so enthusiastically transparent about the project -- that they have so few qualms about editing, redacting and altering their alleged scripture so that it no longer condemns their ideology and their idol. But it's not surprising that they've come to this point.

This point is on the line and following that line leads, inescapably, to this point. It was unavoidable.

So I want to take a closer look at this project. It's ridiculous and extreme and brazenly blasphemous and colossally illiterate, but this is the future of the religious right. This is what's next. Don't think of it as a point further out along an ideological spectrum, think of it as a point further along in the inevitable chronology of American evangelicalism.

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* Thanks to Michael B., Adrian T., Andrew M., Chris H., Craig L. and Steve S. for linking to this via e-mail.

GooFi videos

The exposés of Good Fight Ministries seem like a useful example because they are a-political and nonpartisan. They're crazy in a way that is neither Democratic nor Republican and so we can use them as a source of light without quite so much heat.

What we find in those exposés are a host of untrue statements. The videos on Good Fight Theater -- all narrated by Breathless Stoner Dude -- present a barrage of falsehoods and bogus claims. Some of those claims seem to stem from a kind of innocent stupidity, others seem like something else.

We can categorize Good Fight Ministries' craziness into several broad categories.

1. Mostly innocent.

The GooFi folks seem to accept every marketing claim or posture at face value. A band trying to drum up free publicity by posing as "Satanists" using ridiculous imagery lifted from old Vincent Price movies will be assumed, by GooFi, to be revealing the truth about itself. GooFi and the BSD won't hesitate to accept that members of some heavy metal band participate in a Black Mass, but it would never occur to them that the same band might be lying to sell records.

I think this traces back to the illiteralism of GooFi's biblical fundamentalist hermeneutic which teaches, among other things, that all narrators are reliable and trustworthy. That doesn't serve one well if one is listening to a song such as, for example, "Sympathy for the Devil." (One can only guess what these folks would make of a novel like Lolita.)

The illiterate credulity of this interpretive framework also means that, as a rule, irony eludes them. Based on the way GooFi interprets the lyrics of the songs they discuss in their video exposés, we can guess that they would also conclude that Elvis Costello is genuinely just about glad we didn't do that thing, that John Waite emphatically ain't missing you at all, and that the members of 10cc, most certainly, are not in love.

Much of what we find in the GooFi videos, then, seems to have started with people who don't know how to tell what a song means trying to tell us what songs mean. If they hadn't gone any further, we might regard such misinterpretations and misconstruals as innocent mistakes. But of course they do go much further, straining and eventually demolishing any such innocent explanation.

More generally, their misapprehensions all go in the same direction, reflecting their predisposition or desire to find supposed evidence of Satan's hand at work in other people. The choice to view others in this way relies on a presumption or prejudice about oneself and about others that cannot be traced back to a place of real innocence.

2. Suspect.

It's possible for any of us to misapprehend something and to maintain that initial misreading for years if we never again encounter or engage the subject of our mistake. But the more exposure and experience we have with the subject of that mistake, the harder it becomes to maintain the original misconception without our actively doing just that -- maintaining it.

Maintaining such misconceptions in the face of uncooperative reality requires us to start filtering what we are willing to look at, to see or to acknowledge. We have to start pretending not to see all of the counter-evidence confronting us at every turn. We have to start valuing and protecting the misconception above reality itself, altering what we say about that reality to ourselves and to others. To be that deeply engaged in maintaining the misconception doesn't strike me as naively innocent behavior.

"This American Life" did an episode on innocent misconceptions that included a segment on words we initially pronounce wrong in our heads until we finally hear them spoken out loud. Quite a few people admitted to being led amiss by the word misled, initially taking it for the past tense of the verb "to misle." And once your brain latches on to that pronunciation, that's how you'll think of it -- MYZE uld. The TAL segment did a good job illustrating the embarrassing epiphany of those who, eventually -- sometimes after many years -- heard someone else say miss-led and suddenly realized, Ohhhh. Of course. Oops.

Such epiphanies are more difficult if you're more invested in your initial mistake -- emotionally, philosophically, even spiritually invested in it. If your whole concept of who you are and how the world works is tied up in pronouncing the word MYZE-uld then you can't just abandon doing so after hearing it properly said. You wouldn't be eager to correct your error, but instead would fight to defend it. Soon you'd be shunning dictionaries and public radio and anyone else who might employ the threatening proper use of the term. The sheer number of things you'd have to avoid would require some explanation, so you'd cling to the notion of a vast conspiracy of evil mislers out there trying to misle you away from the true path. You'd need to construct a massive and increasingly implausible cognitive structure to buttress your initial mistake, and the bigger that structure grew, the harder it would be for you to pretend it isn't there.

The maintenance of that structure takes conscious effort. That consciousness and that effort both contradict the claim that this is any longer just an "innocent mistake." Such conscious effort makes what might have started as mostly innocent mistakes suspect. And further conscious effort can push them into the next category ...

3. Mostly malicious.

Much of what we find in GooFi's exposés seems to be deliberate, intentional misrepresentation. Some of this stuff they've simply invented and it's difficult to imagine how such fabrications could be accidental or inadvertent. The BSD says many things he has to know cannot be true, and he twists many things to suggest that they mean what they cannot mean.

The rationalization for this, I'm guessing, is that a little white lie is justified if you're doing battle with Satan. This ends-justifies-the-means approach only works in this case if you don't allow yourself to think about it very long. Give it more than a moment's thought and you'll have to concede that you can't falsely accuse someone of being in league with Satan just because, if they were in league with Satan, then it'd be OK to say false things about them. It comes down to a variation of this:

"He tortures bunny rabbits."
"You know that's not true."
"Maybe not, but what's a little dishonesty compared to torturing bunny rabbits?"

And that's never terribly convincing.

But so anyway, I wanted to look at more of the specifics of GooFi's U2 video, and also at their delightfully weird Robert Johnson video (they treat the Crossroads legend as objective history, not as folklore) and instead wound up taking a detour into far less amusing abstractions. Sorry about that. We'll have to get back to some of those videos tomorrow.

Weak

If you've ever spent any time as part of a religious community or congregation, then you can appreciate the wisdom of Paul's advice in Romans 14.

All of us have issues, hang-ups, hobby horses and bug bears, and for some people these can be particularly intense. Growing up among the fundies, I learned that there were many things our family enjoyed that some of our friends at church or Christian school regarded as sinful. Rock music, movies, gin rummy (even Uno and Old Maid were considered sinful by some of these folks). My parents considered my RPG hobby an imaginative form of play that kept us out of trouble, but to many of the people at our church, such games weren't merely sinful, they were demonic. One friend was allowed to play with us, but only if we used the Middle Earth (MERP) system -- Tolkien, as a buddy of C.S. Lewis, was granted a special dispensation.

My parents were aware that many of our fellow believers viewed these non-sins as sinful, so our family took a pragmatic approach. We just didn't talk to those people about music or movies or games of which they didn't approve.

That was in line with the practical pastoral advice Paul gives in Romans 14.

The first-century Roman church had a different set of hang-ups than the 20th-century American one, obviously. Their dispute didn't have to do with dancing, cards, movies or rock & roll. It had to do with dietary codes and, in particular, with the eating of meat from Roman markets, which may have been ceremonially offered or dedicated to the Roman gods before it was sold.

"Heavens to Betsy!" cried the ancient Roman ancestors of my Uno-shunning fellow evangelicals. "If you eat that meat you're participating in idolatry!"

This was a silly and unnecessary rule and not really the sort of thing the church was supposed to be about, so most of the Roman Christians kept their eye on the ball and just ignored the conniptions of their more fastidious brethren. That, of course, only made those folks even more upset and offended, and it grew into enough of a big deal among the Roman Christians that Paul had to address it in his letter.

Look, he told them, you know this is stupid and I know this is stupid. It doesn't matter what you eat. But some of the folks with you there are, frankly, weak -- that's Paul's word, "weak" -- and even though this shouldn't be a big deal for them, it is. So be nice and don't rub their noses in it. I don't care what you eat and neither does God, but we both care how you're all getting along -- that matters. So for the sake of getting along, accommodate the weaker ones and don't eat that stuff.

The implicit hope and expectation there, of course, is that these "weak" Christians will gradually grow stronger and the community would eventually be able to get beyond stupid and meaningless disputes about stupid and meaningless rules.

But what if these weaker brethren don't ever get any stronger? Paul doesn't address that question in his letter. He doesn't get into the second-generation problem of what happens when those weak, more fastidious Christians begin to treat the deference they are being shown as a source of power, and then begin to prefer that manipulative power to developing actual strength.

Does Paul's specific advice here really mean that we ought to accept the permanent, dynastic rule of the least mature among us? Or are there limits to this accommodation?

What I'm getting at, in other words, is the dilemma that occurs when we give someone the benefit of the doubt and they abuse the favor, turning that benefit into a weapon against us.

The Internet Monk addressed this question a few years back in a post titled "The Tyranny of the Offended." The issue addressed in that post was the monk's tolerance for what one of his critics described as "profanity and obscenity" and his corruption of youth.

Specifically, the critic was upset by the use of the term "ass-kickery."

My response to that sort of thing is usually to recite scripture: "Why beholdest thou the mote that is in thy brother's eye, but considerest not the cedar of Lebanon that is stuck up thine own ass?"

But the monk is a better Christian than that, so he patiently and carefully works through his obligation to this particular belligerent weaker brethren, considering both Romans 14 and a parallel passage in 1 Corinthians. It isn't easy to maintain such patience when confronted with a member of the Cult of the Offended, and the strain shows in a few lovely zingers throughout. It's four years old, but read the whole thing anyway. Here are some excerpts:

I believe the overly scrupulous have distorted the Christian life and misrepresented the Bible. In fact, I believe a kind of “prissiness” and prudishness seriously misrepresent the Gospel.

I do not believe human offendedness accurately represents the Biblical view of sin, nor a safe path to sanctification and holiness. ...

Is Paul recommending that the Christian community become a nanny state run by those who are empowered by real and perceived wrongs? Will the most offended become the most influential? ...

The Corinthian Church, that received chapter 8 of that first epistle, was a hive of whining, division, complaining and immature insistence on their own way. Paul did not apply the force of the principle at hand to empowering the least mature elements of the church. He risked offending them all for the sake of the Gospel, and even threatened to come to them with a stick, if necessary.

... my own experience with Jesus in the Gospels leaves me with the assurance that my savior is not a divine nanny, and the path to holiness is to read all of the Bible through Christ and to live out the Bible in Christ. While I appreciate the sincerity of my critic, we will differ on this matter.

Here's where I differ with the Monk, because I do not appreciate the sincerity of his critic. I do not believe his critic is sincere.

I believe, rather, that he is among those who have chosen to be perpetually offended because such a pose can be exploited as a kind of power. I believe that he is among those who have identified exactly the dynamic the Monk describes, in which "the most offended become the most influential." And I believe he is among those who have chosen to to pursue exactly that source and form of influence.

I believe, further, that such people have come to wield so much influence in my evangelical community that they are now its dominant voice. And outside of the church, I believe the same dynamic is at work in American politics -- partly, but not exclusively, due to the influence of evangelicals as a core constituency in our political system.

I'm not asking you to share or accept all of those beliefs here. Don't let's get bogged down in the particulars of any given instance or example. All I ask of you here is to accept that such a thing is conceivable, that it is possible.

A vast number of my fellow evangelicals and my fellow Americans have come to define themselves primarily by what they are against, by that which offends them. I'm sure that many of them are, indeed, sincerely offended and sincerely opposed to the many things at which they take offense. But I am equally certain that many are less sincere and that some are wholly insincere, and I fear that the least sincere among them have taken charge.

I don't ask you to share that certainty, but only to concede that such a thing is possible -- that it is within the realm of possibility that some people might be insincere, might lie, might hide behind a pose of offendedness, exploiting our reluctance to level such accusations and abusing our admirable inclination to accommodate those most easily offended.

Over time, of course, I will try to convince you that such a thing is not merely possible, but actual. I will try to make the case that the Monk's nightmare scenario of "a nanny state run by those empowered by perceived wrongs" is not merely a hypothetical concern, but the agenda actively pursued by people for whom "The Tyranny of the Offended" is not a nightmare, but a game plan.

Quincentennary, I

So two Fridays ago (July 10) was John Calvin's 500th birthday. It seems fitting then, to offer a few thoughts on the man and his legacy, both of which were considerable.

There's a great deal to appreciate with Calvin, as well as a good bit I'd like to take issue with, but let's start by dispensing with one unpleasant aspect of Calvin's legacy that's not his fault. I'm referring to the insistence of some of his most vocal disciples that the world can and must be divided neatly in two between Calvinists and not-Calvinists, and that everyone in the latter, much larger, category, can be accurately squeezed into the box labeled "Arminian."

Are you a Calvinist or an Arminian?

Um, I don't know. Both?

You can't be both.

Well, then, I guess neither.

You can't be neither.

St. Paul was neither.

The apostle Paul was a Calvinist.

That seems chronologically unlikely ...

Which are you?

Do I have to choose?

That's the question, isn't it? But you have to be one or the other. Which are you?

I'm a Mets fan, a Mac user, a gemini, a Baptist ...

So you're an Arminian then.

Did I say that?

If you're not a Calvinist, then you're an Arminian.

I'm not even sure Arminius was an Arminian, the way you're ...

Anyone who isn't a Calvinist is an Arminian.

Oh, then OK, I guess he probably was. But still I ...

Which are you? Which are you?

I don't see why anyone finds such conversations helpful.

On offendedness

I've been thinking a lot lately about the cult of offendedness, the drug of smug, the reassuring substitute for legitimate anger that has come to dominate and to shape the politics and the religion of my evangelical Christian tradition.

So it was fortuitous, or maybe providential, that David Dark was kind enough to arrange for me to receive a review copy of his latest book, The Sacredness of Questioning Everything, which deals, in part, with that very topic.

The thing about review copies, of course, is that one is supposed to review them. And I will try to get around to doing that at some point once I figure out something more intelligent and helpful to say about the book beyond, "Buy this and read this now. Then give that copy away and buy another one."

So until then, I'll simply fall back on a lazier form of appreciation and engagement -- repeating big chunks of David's book verbatim.

This is all from his chapter on "Questioning Our Offendedness":

... It might be of interest to note that the earliest known pictorial depiction of Jesus on the cross was a cartoon. Often referred to as "The Alexamenos Graffito," it's a crude drawing of a human figure raising a reverent hand toward a crucified individual with the head of a mule. Discovered on the plaster wall of an ancient Roman school, this second-century parody of a certain Jewish Messianic movment includes, scrawled beneath the caricature, a taunt perhaps best translated as "Alexamenos worships his god."

I wish this particular cartoon could find wider distribution because it dismantles the image of the Christian, historically speaking, as a member of a special interest group, a sleeper cell for a political party, or a power constellation of offended people looking for something to boycott. ...

It probably would have been out of keeping with the presumed ethos of the Jesus whom Alexamenos dared to admire to angrily condemn the ridicule as unacceptable (with a hint of violent reprisal). If the Sermon on the Mount is any indication, Jesus taught his followers that suffering public denunciation is part of the deal. Proclaiming the kingdom of God does not include shouting down anyone who finds your proclamation unconvincing. ...

The feeling of offendedness is invigorating. It might even be an effective way to bend a population toward a tyrant's will. But we must never settle for it. We must not confuse an accelerated pulse rate for the presence of the Holy Spirit in our hearts. We must interrogate our offendedness, hold it open for question. ...

Feeling offended is a reassuring sensation. It's easier than asking ourselves if the redeeming love of God is evident in the way we communicate with people. It's easier than considering our relationships with the huddled masses throughout the world who find themselves on the wrong end of our economic policies and other forms of warfare. Perhaps our cutthroat ways bear some relationship to our confused notions of God. Maybe we think God, as an intergalactic economist, is a survival-of-the-fittest type. ... We might even think that being offended and angry and on the defensive is to be more firmly aligned with the Almighty. ...

To keep it all simple and safe, we often become selective fundamentalists. We know where to go to have our prejudices explained as just and sensible, our convictions strengthened, our group or political party reaffirmed. We process whatever already fits the grid that is hardwired (or re-hardwired) in our heads. It's difficult for anything else to get through. We're easily offended. Maybe we're looking to feel offended, which can make us feel better about ourselves. Feeling offended summons a sense of being in the right, a certain strength, a kind of power, an espresso shot of righteous indignation. And if the image of God hardwired into our nervous system is easily offended and put off by certain people and their offensive behavior, there's a feeling of being that much closer to the winning side, that much more likely to be numbered among the elect, the saved, the documented.

I want to distinguish between this "espresso shot" of reassuring indignation that David describes and the legitimate, and often holy, sense of anger.

Taking offense and getting angry aren't exactly the same thing. Anger has to do with the intolerable difference between what is and what ought to be, which is to say, with injustice. Offendedness has to do with my own discomfort with the difference between how I feel and how I'd prefer to feel. Offendedness makes it all about me.

St. Augustine said, "Hope has two beautiful daughters. Their names are Anger and Courage." Offendedness isn't part of that family. It isn't the offspring of hope nor the sister of courage. And it is never beautiful.

Sub-subminimal

Every job comes with a set of minimum standards. An entry-level volunteer firefighter, for example, must meet a basic standard of physical fitness as well as be able to demonstrate a basic capacity for learning the craft of firefighting and a basic commitment to keeping the community safe.

Every once in a while, though, someone slips through the screening process and reminds us that every job also comes with a set of sub-minimal requirements. A volunteer firefighter, for example, shouldn't also be an arsonist on the side.

We tend to think of such subminimal requirements as things that go without saying, and thus we rarely state them explicitly. The recruiting materials for volunteer fire companies will mention the minimal requirements of time and physical capability, but they won't usually spell out the subminimal requirements. They won't say, in large block letters at the top of the page: "Firebugs need not apply."

Perhaps they should. Because again every once in a while some person comes along who meets the minimum requirements but turns out not to meet the subminimal ones and we are forced to rethink what we have previously allowed to go without saying. We start to think that maybe we should have stated explicitly that candidates shouldn't expect to spend all day in their cubicles surfing cyberporn, or that they will be expected to refrain from embezzling, or not to fabricate articles or plagiarize.

Or not to set fire to the fire station itself.

But of course we could never keep up. Subminimal requirements, it turns out, not only go unspoken but unimagined. It simply wouldn't be possible to list all of them, or even for most of us to conceive of what they might be until we actually witness some sub-subminimal employee who demonstrates for us some new and startling way to delve beneath simple incompetence into the astonishing realm of the sub-subminimal.

The firebug firefighter may be one exception -- an example of a subminimal standard that does need to be stated explicitly. Arsonists -- the sort who set fires for thrills, not for insurance fraud -- tend to seek work with fire departments and volunteer companies. Most squads, therefore, have learned to carefully screen against this, incorporating this one particular subminimal standard into their hiring process.

The closest parallel to the fire departments' problem is an equally common affliction bedeviling school boards and state boards of education. As with fire companies, the vast majority of candidates for these positions are responsible people committed to public service, the common good and quality education. But just like the fire departments, school boards seem to attract a significant unhinged minority of firebugs -- people who just want to destroy public education and laugh while it burns.

The latest of these is Cynthia Dunbar of Texas, whom I learned about thanks to an e-mail from Matt D.

Gov. Rick Perry is reportedly considering appointing the chair of that state's school board. Dunbar wants to destroy public schools, which she regards as "tyrannical" and a "tool of perversion."

Let me repeat that: Gov. Rick Perry of Texas wants to put in charge of his state's public schools a woman who wants to destroy those schools.

Perry doesn't just want to hire the giggling firebug, he wants to make her the fire chief. This makes Gov. Perry the second craziest person in this story.

The craziest, of course, is Cynthia Dunbar who is -- even by Texas Republican standards -- barking mad.

In a book published last year, Dunbar argued the country’s founding fathers created “an emphatically Christian government” and that government should be guided by a “biblical litmus test.” She endorses a belief system that requires “any person desiring to govern have a sincere knowledge and appreciation for the Word of God in order to rightly govern.”

Dunbar -- who is, astonishingly, an attorney -- takes as her first principle of government an illegal and flagrantly unconstitutional religious test. "Unconstitutional" isn't strong enough a description of Dunbar's views on this point, actually, she's anti-constitutional. Her idea of "an emphatically Christian government" ruled by a "biblical litmus test" douses the Constitution in kerosene and sets it ablaze, then pisses on its ashes.

If Dunbar is really an attorney, then the views in her book make a good case for her being disbarred. Maybe even deported.

It doesn't help that Dunbar is also a staggeringly unoriginal whackjob. Her book is titled, One Nation Under God.

That's the same title as dozens of previously published theocratic "next to of course god america i love you land of the pilgrims' and so forth" books. This hackneyed title comes, of course, from the Pledge of Allegiance -- an incantation from which Gov. Rick Perry of Texas has been working hard of late to remove the word "indivisible."

Also in the book, she calls public education a “subtly deceptive tool of perversion.”

The establishment of public schools is unconstitutional and even “tyrannical,” she wrote, because it threatens the authority of families, granted by God through Scripture, to direct the instruction of their children.

Dunbar home-schooled her own children.

The Houston Chronicle's Lisa Falkenberg provides some additional background on Cynthia Dunbar:

If the chatter from some board members proves correct, and Gov. Rick Perry is indeed considering appointing member Cynthia Dunbar as the board’s new leader, we may find ourselves reminiscing fondly about the good ol’ days when Chairman McLeroy simply disregarded experts, sidelined teachers and insisted on inserting his religious beliefs into public policy-making.

Dunbar’s shortcomings go far beyond ideology and poor leadership skills to beliefs promoting paranoia and bigotry.

This is the same Richmond Republican who penned an online essay shortly before the presidential election warning Barack Obama was plotting with terrorists to attack Americans. She refused to retract her claim, even under pressure from Republicans.

There are 4.7 million children in Texas' public schools. There are children in those buildings that Gov. Perry is willing to watch Cynthia Dunbar set on fire. Somewhere there's a line between simple incompetence and outright, deliberate, predatory evil. Dunbar and Perry have crossed it.

Some subminimal standards are worth stating explicitly. Fire companies mustn't hire firebugs. School boards mustn't hire insane home-schooling zealots who want to destroy public schools. Cynthia Dunbar is sub-subminimal.

Tony Perkins' genital politics

So back on Wednesday the House of Representatives passed the Foreign Relations Authorization Act, approving funding for the State Department and the Peace Corps for another two years. The official summary for H.R. 2410 reads:

To authorize appropriations for the Department of State and the Peace Corps for fiscal years 2010 and 2011, to modernize the Foreign Service, to authorize democratic, economic, and social development assistance for Pakistan, to authorize security assistance for Pakistan, and for other purposes.

"Other purposes" you say? Ah, Tony Perkins smells a fundraising opportunity. Those "other purposes" may provide the fodder for something he can use to terrify the members of his Family Research Council, and if he can keep them scared, he can keep them writing checks. So Perkins sifted through the 342 pages of this appropriations bill and found there a couple of items that might loosen the sphincters and purse strings of his eager-to-be-frightened followers.

If you're familiar with Perkins' career, you won't be surprised to learn that these two things are the same two things he's always shrieking about: Abortion and homosexuality. When you've had as much practice as Perkins has, it's not hard to sniff out traces of these in every omnibus appropriations bill and then to elevate them to its primary themes so that you can pretend that a bill "to authorize appropriations for the Department of State and the Peace Corps for fiscal years 2010 and 2011, to modernize the Foreign Service, to authorize democratic, economic, and social development assistance for Pakistan, to authorize security assistance for Pakistan, and for other purposes" is nothing more than a Yes/No vote on abortion and gays.

This is, after all, how Perkins reads the Gospels. None of those books contains even a hint of anything that can be wrestled into a statement on abortion and gays, but he treats them all as treatises defending his peculiarly obsessive strain of genital politics.

Perkins' "Eeek! Gays!" response to H.R. 2410 is at least somewhat explainable. What has his panties in a twist is this section, 140 pages in:

Sec. 333. DISCRIMINATION RELATED TO SEXUAL ORIENTATION

(a) TRACKING VIOLENCE OR CRIMINALIZATION RELATED TO SEXUAL ORIENTATION. -- The Assistant Secretary for Democracy, Human Rights and Labor shall designate a Bureau-based officer or officers who shall be responsible for tracking violence, criminalization, and restrictions on the enjoyment of fundamental freedoms, consistent with United States law, in foreign countries based on actual or perceived sexual orientation and gender identity.

(b) INTERNATIONAL EFFORTS TO REVISE LAWS CRIMINALIZING HOMOSEXUALITY. -- In keeping with the Administration’s endorsement of efforts by the United Nations to decriminalize homosexuality in member states, the Secretary of State shall work though appropriate United States Government employees at United States diplomatic and consular missions to encourage the governments of other countries to reform or repeal laws of such countries criminalizing homosexuality or consensual homosexual conduct, or restricting the enjoyment of fundamental freedoms, consistent with United States law, by homosexual individuals or organizations.

Sec. 333 also contains a provision stating that reports tracking systematic and legal discrimination in other countries will now keep track of discrimination based on "actual or perceived sexual orientation and gender identity" as well as the religious and ethnic discrimination they previously tracked. Perkins is happy that these reports keep track of systematic and legal discrimination against Christians in countries in which they are a religious minority, but he's appalled at the notion that the State Department would also be concerned by the exact same kinds of bias and oppression when it is exercised against "actual or perceived" sex or gender minorities.

Rights for me but not for thee is the opposite of the rule of law. It's also the opposite of the Golden Rule. Opposing this section of this bill is impossible to reconcile with the Family Research Council's claim to "hate the sin but love the sinner." Perkins & Co. believe that homosexual sex is a sin, and that GLBT people need to pray away the gay -- to get saved and let Jesus straighten them out. I understand that view, but I don't follow the leap from such a belief to the idea that we must ignore and implicitly condone the imprisonment or disenfranchisement of GLBT in other nations.

Perkins says that Sec. 333 above constitutes a "radical agenda" that would mean "one of the State Department's biggest priorities would be pressuring other countries to overturn laws that restrict homosexual and transsexual behavior."

Perkins isn't just exaggerating by saying this would become "one of the State Department's biggest priorities," he's lying. It is not possible that he believes his own hyperbole here or his own deliberate distortion. The language of the bill is timid and requires no measurable outcomes. It says that the secretary of state "shall work ... to encourage" the "reform or repeal" of laws criminalizing homosexuality. Just imagine if the bill directed the secretary "to encourage the reform" of North Korea's nuclear weapons program, would Perkins then accept the claim that this was "one of the State Department's biggest priorities"? Of course not.

Note also the liar Tony Perkins' blanket approval of "laws that restrict homosexual and transsexual behavior." He thinks it is wrong to encourage the reform of laws "criminalizing homosexuality or consensual homosexual conduct." He approves of such laws. And more than that, he approves of laws "restricting the enjoyment of fundamental freedoms ... by homosexual individuals." He wants to outlaw gayness and gay sex and he favors laws denying GLBT people the rights of free speech, free assembly, free exercise of their religion, the right to bear arms, to own property, to vote, etc. He favors such laws abroad and he favors such laws here at home.

So for Tony Perkins, restricting fundamental human rights is OK provided it's only for an unpopular minority. That argument always works out so well. ...

It takes a bit more imagination for Perkins to characterize H.R. 2410 as an abortion bill, but the man has no shortage of imagination when it comes to injecting abortion politics anywhere and everywhere that he possibly can. Here is how Perkins introduces his diatribe against this bill for the funding of the State Department and the Peace Corps:

While the Obama Administration has made the claim that they want to reduce abortions in America, they've made no such claims abroad. On the contrary, the current administration is already planning the groundbreaking ceremony for an Office of Global Women's Issues, which is certain to become an international abortion headquarters. ...

I'm not quite sure what "an international abortion headquarters" is supposed to describe, but it's hard to see how the Office of Global Women's Issues, as described in the legislation, would be anything of the sort. See if you can figure out what Perkins is talking about from the text of the bill:

SEC. 334. OFFICE FOR GLOBAL WOMEN’S ISSUES.

(a) ESTABLISHMENT. — There is established an Office for Global Women’s Issues (in this section referred to as the ‘‘Office’’) in the Office of the Secretary of State in the Department of State. The Office shall be headed by the Ambassador-at-Large (in this section referred to as the ‘‘Ambassador’’), who shall be appointed by the President, by and with the advice and consent of the Senate. The Ambassador shall report directly to the Secretary of State.

(b) PURPOSE.—The Office shall coordinate efforts of the United States Government regarding gender integration and women’s empowerment in United States foreign policy.

(c) DUTIES.—

(1) IN GENERAL.—The Ambassador shall —

(A) coordinate and advise on activities, policies, programs, and funding relating to gender integration and women’s empowerment internationally for all bureaus and offices of the Department of State and in the international programs of other United States Government departments and agencies;

(B) design, support, and as appropriate, implement, limited projects regarding women’s empowerment internationally;

(C) actively promote and advance the full integration of gender analysis into the programs, structures, processes, and capacities of all bureaus and offices of the Department of State and in the international programs of other United States Government departments and agencies; and

(D) direct, as appropriate, United States Government resources to respond to needs for gender integration and women’s empowerment in United States Government foreign policies and international programs.

(2) COORDINATING ROLE.—The Ambassador shall coordinate with the United States Agency for International Development and the Millennium Challenge Corporation on all policies, programs, and funding of such agencies relating to gender integration and women’s empowerment.

(3) DIPLOMATIC REPRESENTATION.—Subject to the direction of the President and the Secretary of State, the Ambassador is authorized to represent the United States in matters relevant to the status of women internationally.

(d) REPORTING.—The heads of all bureaus and offices of the Department of State, as appropriate, shall evaluate and monitor all women’s empowerment programs administered by such bureaus and offices and annually submit to the Ambassador a report on such programs and on policies and practices to integrate gender.

Note that nothing in the above mentions abortion or reproductive health at all. Perkins is certain, though, that everything listed there as the agenda of the Office for Global Women’s Issues means one and only one thing: abortion. All that talk about integrating women and empowering them to become full and equal members of society is, to Perkins, nothing more than code words for abortion, abortion, abortion. And therefore, since Perkins is opposed to abortion, he concludes that he must oppose the empowerment of women and any effort to integrate them as full and equal members of male society.

That "therefore" in the preceding sentence is where so much of the anti-abortion movement either goes off the rails or shows itself to never have been on the rails in the first place. That "therefore" does not follow.

Tony Perkins is not a good person nor an honest broker, so let's set him aside for the moment to consider how a different person -- someone truthful and arguing in good faith -- might approach something like this Office for Global Women's Issues.

I used to work on anti-Apartheid stuff with a woman named Leah who was a devout Catholic who believed in the full humanity of the unborn from the moment of conception. Because of that premise, she argued that the unborn had a "right to life" which, in the case of abortion, she believed should outweigh the competing rights of the mother. She did not deny the existence or the validity or the importance of those competing rights, but simply argued that in this one circumstance, the unborn person's rights trumped them. Given her premise, that's a reasonable conclusion. It parallels the logic of Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes' observation that your right to extend your arm ends where my nose begins.

But I'm afraid that people like Leah have not become the leading voices of the anti-abortion movement in this country. The leading voices belong to those who do not simply argue that one set of competing rights ought to outweigh the other, but who argue that only one set of competing rights is legitimate. Because my nose exists, they argue, you have no right, ever, to extend your arm. This is the sweeping non-sequitur we hear all the time from people like Perkins. He isn't satisfied to argue that a "right to life" for the unborn deserves to be weighed against the competing rights of the mother or of all women, but instead he races beyond anywhere his premise suggests or allows to insist that no such rights of the mother or of all women even exist.

We saw this absurdity on display here in Pennsylvania when it got our former junior senator, Rick Santorum, laughed out of office. Roe v. Wade was decided, in part, on the recognition of the fundamental right to privacy. Santorum's purported belief in the full humanity of the unborn ought therefore to have led him to argue that the right to privacy was, in the case of abortion, outweighed by the competing rights of the unborn, but Santorum wasn't satisfied to make that claim. Instead, he went mad. Santorum declared that the right to privacy does not exist, that any claim to such a right was a "myth," and that all that is not expressly permitted is forbidden. He thus became an advocate not merely of "big government," but of boundless government. He was thus invited, by a huge bipartisan majority, to return to the, um, private sector.

Tony Perkins and the Family Research Council are here following Santorum off the same cliff, repeating his lunacy as it applies to "gender integration and women’s empowerment." Perkins goes far, far beyond what logically flows from or is required by his premise of a commitment to a "right to life" for the unborn, choosing instead to deny, denounce and reject the very existence of any rights that might possibly compete with it.

As evidence that gender integration and the empowerment of women are simply code words for "unlimited abortion," (meaning only and exclusively that), Perkins quotes Secretary of State Hillary Clinton: "We are now an administration that will protect the rights of women, including their rights to reproductive health care." If reproductive health care might be construed to include legal abortion, then Perkins concludes that women must be denied reproductive health care. And if "protecting the rights of women" necessarily entails reproductive health care, then Perkins concludes that he must oppose rights for women -- all rights for women. Thus he arrives at this astonishing place of fierce opposition to the integration and empowerment of women anywhere on earth.

Again, Perkins' position does not logically flow from his alleged premise of rights for the unborn. That premise does not and cannot carry him to the place at which he has arrived. So how did he get there?

I think it's safe to assume that this is where he has arrived because this is where he always intended to go. Tony Perkins opposes gender integration and women's empowerment. He opposes protecting the rights of women and he opposes women having any right to reproductive health care. He claims that he opposes all of these things based on his opposition to abortion, but that train won't get him there. He got there all on his own. Concern for the rights of the unborn had nothing to do with it.