slacktivist

The fatuous foolishness of the Manhattan Declaration

I had meant to conclude with a final post on this subject reserved simply for laughing at the Manhattan Declaration and the comical preening of its pompous prose.

 It provides a hilarious, real-world example of the kind of wince-inducing misplaced self-importance and lack of perspective that I've always enjoyed when it's performed by people like Ricky Gervais or Rowan Atkinson or Steve Coogan. The document begins with the authors comparing themselves to those who defended Christendom against the onslaught of "barbarian tribes." Then they declare themselves the heirs of John Wesley and William Wilberforce and compare themselves to all those who suffered injustice during the long struggle for civil rights. And they're still just warming up on their primary subject -- their righteous courage and courageous righteousness. By the end of the document, they're presenting themselves, without qualification or perspective, as a combination of Augustine, Aquinas and Martin Luther King Jr. and comparing their document to King's "Letter from a Birmingham Jail" -- blissfully disregarding the ways in which a "Press Release from the National Press Club" isn't quite the same thing.

Their own awesomeness is a topic the authors address with relentless relish. Everything else in the document is merely a foil for this central subject. The threat of The Gay is grave, ominous and potentially world-altering, they warn, repeatedly, before reassuring us that their heroic resolve and moral superiority will save the day. Even the passages in which they luxuriate in their own massive humility are saturated with this swaggering self-regard.

This all-consuming self-absorption coupled with an utter lack of self-awareness plays like something from a Christopher Guest movie. I'm only half-convinced at this point that Robert George is even a real person and not a Fred Willard improv run amok. The authors possess that same remarkable knack for straight-faced seriousness while making uproariously ridiculous assertions.

And at one level it's impossible to view these pretentious peacocks, these Malvolios grimacing and strutting in their yellow stockings, without succumbing to the derisive laughter they deserve. Such self-inflation demands deflation. And anyway it can't be helped. I mean, just listen to them:

We pledge to each other, and to our fellow believers, that no power on earth, be it cultural or political, will intimidate us into silence or acquiescence.

The whole thing is like that -- like a bad parody of the St. Crispin's Day speech from Henry V. Except of course that Henry was outnumbered. Here instead we have a group of powerful elites, men at the center of political, cultural, academic and ecclesiastical privilege bemoaning their oppression at the hands of the homosexuals and religious minorities they claim run the world. They are overlords posing as underdogs. (It's hard out there for a pope.)

And while that's ridiculous, it's not really funny. The claim of oppression is laughably bogus, but the blood on their hands is all too real. A parody of the St. Crispin's Day speech has comic potential, but a parody of the St. Crispin's Day speech as delivered by the pilot of the Enola Gay is too bitterly callous even for my bleak taste in comedy.

So ultimately, even though we're being treated to grand examples of the Blowhard Fool -- a comic type that dates back before Plautus -- this isn't funny. And formally, structurally, we're dealing with tragedy. There is no resolution, no reconciliation, no marriage. (Shakespearean shorthand: Tragedy means everyone dies; comedy means everyone gets married.) Indeed, the whole production here is an explicit rejection of the possibility of reconciliation and an adamant denial of marriage. So this isn't comedy. We can't help but laugh at these tragic clowns, but the laughter has a bitter aftertaste.

The important thing here, though, is to recognize why these buffoons have embraced this buffoonery. Their silliness is not a sideshow. The pompousness is the purpose. The fatuousness is the function. This is, as the kids on the Internets like to say, a feature, not a bug.

The anti-gay, anti-abortion, anti-religious minority Manhattan Declaration is not primarily about opposing any of those things. That's all just collateral damage. The primary purpose of the Manhattan Declaration, its raison d'etre, is to help the authors and signatories convince themselves that they're better than everyone else. The ridiculous, overweening pride is what it's for.

Chuck Colson, Robert George and Timothy George are blitzed out of their minds on the drug of smug. They're hard-core umbrage junkies, snorting offendedness, mainlining grievance, freebasing uncut self-righteousness.

This is your brain on smug. Just say no.

Don't know much about history

"It is a truth universally acknowledged, that a single man in possession of a good fortune must be in want of a wife. ..."

So begins Jane Austen's Pride and Prejudice, and if you ever set out to write a novel you should try if you can to produce an opening sentence as good as that one. But don't bother trying to do better, it can't be done. That's perfection, right there -- a memorable quip that presents, in miniature, the world, plot and central conflicts of the novel while simultaneously and indelibly establishing the sardonic voice and view of the narrator. Genius.

Anyway, I repeat this line here not just to bask in the brilliance of Jane Austen -- although that's always worth doing -- but to point out that Jane would have been mystified by Ron Sider's recent description of marriage as an institution wholly unlike the economic arrangements described in her novels. Sider's further assertion that his conception of marriage represents a constant, enduring description of the institution as it has existed throughout all of human history -- in every culture and every civilization  -- would likely have left Jane not just baffled, but furious.

This discussion of marriage comes in a conversation with Stephen Thrasher of the Village Voice in which Sider gamely tries to defend his endorsement of the Manhattan Declaration which states, among other things, that opposition to marriage equality for same-sex couples is a non-negotiable Christian duty.

It's an interesting thing to watch a peaceable, gentle man attempting to defend a belligerent, aggressive document while trying to avoid personally insulting and demeaning the people the document he just signed insults and demeans. That leads to some curious developments, such as Ron's surprising endorsement for the first time I've seen of civil unions. Similar comments on NPR's Fresh Air wound up costing Richard Cizik his job with the National Association of Evangelicals -- to the NAE's great shame and detriment. Cizik went on to help lead the evangelical movement against climate change -- an effort that, according to Manhattan Declaration author Chuck Colson, this new document explicitly was created to counteract.

(How do you make homophobia even more wrong-headed and harmful? By trying to use homophobia to suppress action against climate change. Colson stands by his "principles" come Hell or high water because, apparently, Hell and high water are his principles.)

It's not easy to provide a pithy quote summarizing the vision of marriage Sider is trying to defend in his conversation with Thrasher, because that vision isn't coherent enough for such a summary. But what he's trying to do is to ground opposition to same-sex marriage in a sociological, rather than a sectarian, argument:*

I would be open to a legal category of civil partnership. Gay people could have a specified number of legal rights that would encourage their ongoing commitment. But what really matters, and what's really decisive, is what marriage means ... the reason every civilization in history has defined marriage between men and women, is that society has a lot at stake in preserving continuity, in a wholesome way. It's quite clear that when men and women who have sex and make babies stay together. It's better for their children, and it's better that children grow up with their moms and dads -- and that's why societies have defined marriage, to protect making babies. The real question is, what is marriage?

This is precisely not a religious argument. It's an argument about what a society needs, to preserve itself, to preserve what is wholesome from generation to generation. The core of that argument is historic, from every civilization. ...

My argument [is] not a religious argument. It is about what marriage means. It's true, a lot of contemporaries have redefined marriage. Marriage now means an emotional, romantic relationship between people. If that is what marriage is, then it should ought to be available to gays or lesbians. But if marriage is what every culture has always said it was, then it makes no sense to offer it to everyone ...

This argument, by his own admission, hinges upon the idea that "every culture ... in every civilization ... has always said" the same thing about what marriage is and what it means. It requires that every culture and civilization throughout human history must regard or have regarded marriage as a lifelong, monogamous commitment between one and only one heterosexual male and one and only one hetersexual female, and that this commitment exists primarily for -- in the celibate cleric's language used in the Manhattan Declaration -- "procreation and the unique character and value of acts and relationships whose meaning is shaped by their aptness for the generation, promotion and protection of life."

And this claim of a constant, unchanging and enduring singular form of marriage across history, civilizations and cultures is insupportable. It is a truth almost universally acknowledged that such a claim requires a staggering ignorance of history, civilizations and cultures.

Consider the historical and cultural record of the book that the Manhattan signatories claim is their favorite: The Bible. Examples of this allegedly constant marital ideal of a heterosexual, monogamous, lifelong union of shopkeepers primarily for procreation are remarkably rare in the Bible. The patriarchs, kings and prophets who dominate the Hebrew scriptures almost never conformed to this model. Nor do the apostles and missionaries who dominate the New Testament. We can find a scattered handful of examples of such marriages in the Bible -- Moses and Zipporah, Priscilla and Aquila, maybe Pontius Pilate -- but as a historical document of human families and marriages, the Bible offers a dizzying diversity of polygamists, economic alliances, political alliances, concubines, serial adulterers, celibates, devout absentees and kinsman-redeemers, and none of those support Ron's contention of a monolithic, unchanging universal form of marriage.

And anyone who imagines that our world, today, does not contain just as diverse an array of models, forms and kinds of marriage must not get out much.

Seriously, Ron's supposedly exclusive, historically constant model of marriage doesn't even encompass my family -- and there are many millions like mine across America. No one is yet explicitly advocating that marriages like mine ought to be denied full legal legitimacy, relegated to second-class status as mere "civil unions," but that is, in fact, what a great number of Ron's co-signatories of the Manhattan Declaration -- celibate men in funny hats -- believe ought to be the case.

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* The acknowledgement that a solely sectarian argument wouldn't be a sufficient basis for civil law is another place where Sider contradicts the Manhattan Declaration. It advocates for "religious liberty," redefining that as the asserted right not to have to present non-sectarian arguments. The suggestion that the declaration's Catholic and evangelical signatories might need to present such nonsectarian arguments if they want wider support for their religious opposition to abortion and homosexuality is what those signatories mean by religious persecution. They view pluralism and secularism as affronts to their religious liberty.

Pulling a Lieberman

First let me say a word in praise and defense of my former boss, my professor, mentor and friend Ron Sider. I need to start off with this affirming word because by the end of this post -- and in the one to follow -- I'm afraid I'm going to have to be rather harshly critical of my old friend.

Sider's book Rich Christians in an Age of Hunger is an unflinching, uncompromising assessment of the Christian obligation to share with those in need. I know of few people able or willing to live up to that book's powerful call to sacrificial generosity, but Sider himself has done so for many decades. He is a gentle, irenic man and a Good Man.

But he is a Good Man in a Bad System -- a system that requires a pervasive and unavoidable kind of badness that seeps into and infects the good of Good People trapped within it, preventing them from even imagining any alternative. More on that in a moment.

For now, I just want to reiterate that I have enormous respect and affection for Ron Sider, so much so that my regard for him is able to withstand even something like his dismaying endorsement of the overwrought, corrupt and corrupting "Manhattan Declaration."

In partial defense of Ron, though, we should note that his signature and support were secured under false pretenses. It seems he was lied to.

The organizers of this right-wing manifesto du jour needed a token liberal to provide a bipartisan fig-leaf, so they turned to Ron Sider (about as close as the evangelical world allows to a liberal) to be their Lieberman. But to convince him to play this role, they had to lie to him.

I don't know which or how many of the declaration's three author-organizers did the actual lying. My money would be on convicted felon and would-be domestic terrorist Chuck Colson. (Yes, terrorist. Plotting to burn down the Brookings Institution in order to silence opposition from centrists is political terrorism.) The two Georges -- Robert and Timothy -- strike me as less cynical true believers. They're more like the moral philosopher equivalent of one of those physicists who becomes obsessed with his design for a perpetual motion machine -- railing against friction and entropy and insisting that they'll make the thing work some day.

But someone -- one of those three -- deliberately misled Ron Sider about the content and intent of the Manhattan Declaration and Sider, to his discredit, took their word for it.

Here, from a recent e-mail to members of his nonprofit, is Ron Sider's description of how he understands the Manhattan Declaration:

Last Friday I joined a circle of prominent Catholic, Orthodox, and evangelical leaders at the National Press Club in Washington to launch the Manhattan Declaration, which places the issues of sanctity of life, traditional marriage, and religious liberty in the context of longstanding Christian concern for combating poverty and racism and promoting the dignity of women.

For decades I have sought to promote what the Manhattan Declaration calls a “truly consistent ethic of love and life for all humans in all circumstances.” I agree strongly with the Declaration, that the sanctity of human life, the historical definition of marriage, and robust religious freedom are under serious threat at this point in our history. The Declaration does NOT say that these are the most important moral issues of our time. It only says that these are crucial moral issues.

This is utterly wrong. I don't just mean that he's wrong on this issues -- which I think he is. Or that it's utterly wrong to champion bigotry while calling it an "ethic of love and life for all humans in all circumstances" -- which of course it is. What I mean specifically is that the Declaration does claim that abortion, homosexuality and the "religious freedom" to enforce the criminalization of both are the most important moral issues of our time. The Declaration exists to say precisely that. It's entire purpose and intent is to "declare" that these three things stand above and apart from any other issues -- to declare that they must not be viewed "in the context of longstanding Christian concern for combating poverty" or the context of anything else.

The whole point of this document was to threaten younger evangelicals who were perceived as getting a bit wobbly in their opposition to homosexuality. Evangelical Christians under 30 just don't seem to see that as a paramount moral concern -- and they can't see how gay couples wanting to marry could possibly be viewed as more morally significant than the fact that, by the time these younger evangelicals get to be Colson's age, Bangladesh will be under water.

The Manhattan Declaration was created to threaten these younger evangelicals to get back in line with the precise priorities of their elders. Get back in line or be cut off. When talking to The New York Times' Laurie Goodstein, Colson is much more candid about this than he seems to have been when suckering Ron into pulling a Lieberman:

The signers ... say they also want to speak to younger Christians who have become engaged in issues like climate change and global poverty, and who are more accepting of homosexuality than their elders. They say they want to remind them that abortion, homosexuality and religious freedom are still paramount issues.

“We argue that there is a hierarchy of issues,” said Charles Colson, a prominent evangelical who founded Prison Fellowship after serving time in prison for his role in the Watergate scandal. “A lot of the younger evangelicals say they’re all alike. We’re hoping to educate them that these are the three most important issues.”

Paramount. "Hierarchy." "These are the three most important."

That's three ways of saying the exact opposite of what Sider was led to believe.

So, yes, I think that Colson lied to get Ron to sign on and that Ron fell for it.

The question is why. What did Ron think was in it for him? The answer isn't pretty. Not for Ron or for the evangelical world that, as a matter of routine, forces everyone in it to behave ignobly and disingenuously.

At the paper overnight it's just me and Betty, the security officer who comes through every half hour on her rounds. Private security is all about "loss prevention," which means, more or less, that it's Betty's job to circle the building every half hour to confirm that it's not on fire. But Betty's bosses and the insurance company don't just take her word for it that she's making her rounds. She has a little electronic wand that she has to wave over little electronic checkpoints throughout the building to confirm and record that she's faithfully doing her job. If she ever slipped up and missed a checkpoint, the wand would record this omission and she'd be in a world of trouble.

That's basically how the evangelical subculture works. Everyone within that closed system has to check in, regularly, to reaffirm their allegiance to the two core principles of the religion: opposition to legal abortion and the legal and cultural marginalization of homosexuals.

It doesn't matter if those things have little to do with the work to which God may have called you. You might be a nurse in a mission hospital or you might run a soup kitchen or a rehab center or you might be the choir director for a local church. It doesn't matter. You're still going to have to check in regularly to confirm your opposition to The Gay and to legal abortion.

Fail to do so with the requisite enthusiasm and you're out, you're done, you're anathema.

Formal structures for enforcing this are unnecessary -- it's woven into the fabric of the subculture. Periodically, this implicit requirement is made explicit through formal "declarations" like this Manhattan thing, but such formal reinforcements are hardly needed.

Playing along with this system is easy. Just wave the little wand over the checkpoint and pretend that it makes perfect sense to regard abortion and homosexuality as the "paramount" concerns of the Bible, of the Gospels, of Jesus Christ. Pretend that it makes perfect sense to view the requisite stances on those issues as compatible with what the Bible, the Gospels and Jesus Christ have to say.

Just play along and say what you're required to say and they'll let you go back to whatever lesser things you might have been trying to do for a little while. Embrace the smug on cue. When asked, pledge your allegiance to the idea that self-righteous pride -- the cardinal vice -- is a worthy replacement for the cardinal virtue and you'll be an evangelical in good standing.

And even if you personally don't require a disingenuous claim of persecution to get your jollies, what does it cost you to play along with the lie? What does it really cost you to pretend that your privileged, hegemonic majority is being persecuted by minorities forced to live on the fringes of your culture? What does it really cost you to pretend that your own religious freedom requires the restriction or eradication of others?

What does it cost you, I mean, besides your soul?

That's the bargain Ron was willing to make, whether or not he was lied to about it. And I'm afraid that willingness is indefensible.

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.

- - - - - - - - - - - -

* 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.