slacktivist

Manifested

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Where the manifesto ends up on the matter is this:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Hier stehe ich

Let me clarify that my earlier Protestant protest against the notion that the forgiveness of sins is exclusively available through the mediation of church officials shouldn't in any way be taken as an objection to the practice of priests hearing confession. I love the idea of confession. Whether via the Catholic model or the AA model, confessing to somebody else -- some-body else -- helps us humans accept that we've been heard. Such confessions can also help to free us from the "let's all pretend we're perfect" hypocrisy and the anxiety that fuels it. (David Bazan neatly summed up that anxiety in an album title, When They Really Get to Know You They Will Run.)

I love G.K. Chesterton's Father Brown stories. Father Brown's claim to fame as a detective is that he understands people due to having heard, for years, the confessions of his parishioners. The beautiful thing in these stories is the little priest's generosity of spirit -- the more he comes to know and understand people, the more he loves them.

That's immensely important with regard to the anxiety mentioned above. We humans need to be loved. To be loved without being truly known doesn't count, but we're terrified that being truly known would disqualify us from being loved. That fear can make us hypocrites, turning every Sunday into a kind of awkward first date with God. Such hypocrisy is exhausting and unsatisfying, preventing us from being -- or at least from feeling -- truly known or truly loved either by God or by any of God's human surrogates here on earth.

So I rather like the idea of confession.

I do, of course, disagree -- respectfully but strenuously -- with Roman Catholic doctrine on several points. I couldn't very well be a Protestant or evangelical or Baptist if I didn't. Likewise, an orthodox Catholic will, unsurprisingly, disagree with me. It wouldn't occur to me to regard such disagreement as evidence of "anti-Baptist" or "anti-Protestant" chauvinism on their part. "Non-" =/= "anti-." And so it didn't occur to me either that my comments on feeling really, really non-Catholic during that confirmation homily could or would be interpreted as anti-Catholic.

I can't help but wonder if I stepped in it a bit because, coming from a tradition that accommodates and celebrates dissent, I'm accustomed to discussing such disagreements in a way that sounds hostile to those coming from a tradition that, you know, doesn't. If so, then I've probably just stepped in it again.

In any case, it's Thursday, so please feel free to disagree -- respectfully but strenuously. (Or to disregard this topic altogether and just consider this a Thursday flamewar open thread.)

The Guinness Book

Os Guinness has popped up on my screen here twice in the past week, so I suppose we should see what's going on with him.

I first encountered Guinness through his entertaining and insightful little book, The Gravedigger File. In that book Guinness shamelessly borrows the mirror-image, devil's eye view of C.S. Lewis' Screwtape Letters (if you're gonna steal, steal from the good stuff) for a breezy discussion of what he calls there "the subversion of the modern church."

I'd forgotten most of that book, but one thing that has stuck with me over the years since I read it was the Devil's maxim: "Remember 10-10-80."

How many times I have watched him listen to devastating reports in cold silence and then utter the words: "Remember 10-10-80." It is simply the shorthand for his own axiom: Win over 10 percent of the church to be a counter-elite on our side, reduce 80 percent of the church to a state of passive acceptance (either cowed or complacent), and we can disregard the active resistance of the remaining 10 percent (part of which is the lunatic fringe anyway).

This latter 10 percent is a particularly important category. It allows us a margin of error. It also takes into account all those exceptions to the trends we are manipulating successfully. If such exceptions were ever to amount to more than 10 percent, we would have to bring in the contingency plans. But for a long time we have been well within this limit.

That formula seems to me a useful rule of thumb that's applicable well beyond the particular case of religious vitality. (It might apply, to pick just one example, to the current question about whether America is "ready for" a black or female president.)

Anyway, Guinness' name popped up last week due to his involvement with the latest "Evangelical Manifesto," which apparently goes public next week. Sarah Posner discusses the document in her invaluable FundamentaList, linking to this whiny attempt to pre-empt it from Olaskyite Warren Smith.

Smith's knickers are in a bunch because the theologically conservative professors, theologians and pastors involved in producing this manifesto (to be called, apparently, "The Washington Declaration of Identity") didn't kiss the rings of the politically conservative activists, media moguls and other self-appointed bishops who claim to speak for and in lieu of all such theologians and pastors. Smith thus claims the authors of the document "shunned" people like Charles Colson, James Dobson, Tony Perkins and Beverly LaHaye. He suspects this is because of their political views and not because none of those people are actually involved in the leadership of the church (nor does it occur to him that those four might not have been consulted because, to put it mildly, they aren't actually all that bright).

"Why not let voices from the 'conservative' or so-called 'pro-family' wing of the evangelical movement have input?," Smith asks, arguing that their input would have broadened the document's appeal, making it "truly historic."

So, yes, Warren Smith is a concern troll. And he's not even very good at it.

What's really going on here is that this forthcoming document is an effort to reclaim the word "evangelical" as a religious term rather than as a political one. It is, in other words, a critique of partisan demagoguery masquerading as religion -- a critique of exactly the sort of thing that is practiced, professionally, by the very people Smith complains were "excluded" from writing up that critique.

For a foretaste of that critique, let's turn to the second time Os Guinness came across my screen this week. Will Hinton has been reading Guinness' latest book, The Case for Civility, and provides this excerpt:

I am angered by organizers of the Religious Right who play the victim card and appeal openly to Christian resentment. ...

But whether "victimization" then or a "war on Christians" now, such tactics of the Religious Right are foolish, ineffective, and downright anti-Christian. The problem is not that these people are theocrats, but that they are sub-Christian. They do not violate the separation of church and state so much as they violate Christian integrity. Factually, it is dead wrong for Christians to portray themselves as a minority, let alone as persecuted. Christians are as close to a majority community as any group in America ...

Psychologically, victim-playing is dangerous because it represents what Nietzsche called "the politics of the tarantula," a base appeal to resentment. But worst of all, it is spiritually hypocritical, for nothing so contradicts their claim to represent "Christian values" as their refusal to follow the teaching and example of Jesus of Nazareth by playing the victim card and finding an excuse not to love their enemies. Shame, shame, shame on such people; and woe, woe, woe to such tactics.

Ouch. It's one thing for such a critique to be published in a book and another thing altogether for it to be published as a document signed and endorsed by dozens of prominent theologians and church leaders.

If the leaders of the religious right seriously want to protect themselves from such a critique then they're going to need smarter concern trolls.

(One final caveat: I suspect that, overall, this manifesto will be about as effective as all such "declarations," which is to say not very. We evangelicals are an unruly and disorganized bunch, and these attempts at consensus building by petition are about as close as we come to church polity. The idea is to write something reasonable, sound and persuasive, and then to get as many different "gatekeepers" as possible to endorse it in the hopes that readers will see a name they recognize in the list of signatories and thus regard the statement as worthy of their consideration. It doesn't work very well, but no one has yet come up with a better approach so we keep doing it. As a form of church governance, it's far less efficient, far less decisive, far less authoritative, and infinitely preferable to the Catholic magisterium.)

Translating Huckabee

Doing my best impression of Barbara Billingsley in Airplane: "Oh stewardess! I speak evangelical ..."

Former White House speechwriter Michael Gerson was very skilled at peppering President George W. Bush's public statements with so-called "dog whistle" language targeting evangelical Christian voters. These passing phrases and allusions wouldn't alter or confuse Bush's message to other listeners, but they would have an additional resonance for the evangelicals listening. The actual meaning of those phrases didn't much matter, what was important was that he came across as conversant in the local idiom, the insider's jargon.

To cite a famous example, when Bush said that he believed in the "wonder-working pow'r" of the American people, the message was simply that if Bush used that phrase he must know that song, so he must've sung that song, so he must've been to church, so he must be one of us. No one was supposed to, and few did, think too hard about the bizarre meaning of that statement -- which seemed to equate the American people with "the precious blood of the lamb," suggesting that we could, by rallying around our president, "be free from the burden of sin." That (heretical, arrogant, insane) implication wasn't the point of the allusion. The point was just to reassure evangelicals that he spoke their language, and was therefore on their side, without scaring off everyone else.

Unlike Bush, Mike Huckabee really is a native speaker of the evangelical idiom. He isn't just parroting phrases spelled out phonetically for him by some Wheaton-alum speechwriter, he's talking the way he naturally talks. The effect for evangelical voters is thus the same -- they are reassured he is "one of us." But the effect for everyone else is quite different, because unlike Bush's dog whistles, everyone else can hear Huckabee's allusions too and non-native speakers have a hard time making sense of what he's saying.

To take a trivial example, Huckabee has on several occasions mentioned that he reads a chapter from Proverbs* every day and that he carries his New Testament with him for this purpose. The book of Proverbs, of course, is not in the New Testament, but evangelicals are all familiar with the Pocket Testament League's tiny volumes, the size of a deck of cards, that include not just the 27 books of the New Testament but also the Psalms and Proverbs.** These editions were designed for convenience and not with the intent of dismissing the other 37 books of the Hebrew Scriptures as unimportant, although it's worth noting that most American evangelicals wouldn't notice if the prophets suddenly disappeared from their Bibles. (Evangelical reading tends to focus on Paul's Epistles, Proverbs and pselected Psalms, which is also why Huckabee earns points for his frequent citations from Proverbs but Barack Obama gets none for quoting the book of Amos, as he did yesterday.)

More potentially confusing is Huckabee's reference to "a living God." He used this phrase in the comment we looked at earlier, in which the former Arkansas governor explicitly endorses theocracy. Here again is that comment, as reported by MSNBC:

"[Some of my opponents] do not want to change the Constitution, but I believe it's a lot easier to change the Constitution than it would be to change the word of the living God, and that's what we need to do is to amend the Constitution so it's in God's standards rather than try to change God's standards," Huckabee said.

Over at Making Light, Avram Grumer has some fun with this juxtaposition of "living God" and talk of the Constitution. Since the idea of a "living Constitution" is often railed against by social conservatives who see it as a synonym for "anything goes," Grumer wonders if this means Huckabee believes in an anything-goes God as well:

Wait, “the living god”? Wouldn’t that be some kinda wishy-washy progressive modernist God? I figured Huck for a strict constructionist God, an eye-for-an-eye guy who meant every word of Leviticus when he spake it. “Living God” implies some kind of dynamic, changing God, probably soft on crime, the kind of warm, fuzzy God from whom Words emanate with penumbrae.

In the ensuing discussion,*** Grumer writes, "I'm just amused by the fact that the adjective 'living' seems to imply diametrically opposite things when you apply it to 'God' or 'Constitution.'"

That's astute. The same could be said of the evangelical idiom "the living Word of God" as a reference to the Bible. "Living" there certainly doesn't mean all the wanton things they take it to mean in the phrase "living Constitution." But I don't want to get bogged down in the legal and legalist lit-crit, what I'm interested in here is what this phrase "living God" means.

When a Southern Baptist preacher like Mike Huckabee speaks of "the living God," what he means is that God is active, busy, involved in the world, even that God intervenes in the lives of people and the affairs of nations. That's not in itself an unusual claim for us Christian types to make. I would probably disagree with Huckabee as to the extent and content and intent of that divine involvement, as well as over our capacity for understanding it (there's that effing ineffability again), but I wouldn't object to the use of the phrase "living God." What it means, essentially, is that he is not a Deist.

I should caution, however, that I'm not entirely confident in my ability to translate Huckabee's evangelical-speak because I'm not entirely confident that he isn't using a different kind of dog whistle -- one to which my evangelical ears are not attuned.

Bush's dog-whistle code-words were designed to appeal to evangelical Christian voters without scaring away everyone else. Huckabee isn't doing that -- he employs evangelical idioms without any apparent regard for how it sounds to those unfamiliar with it. But Huckabee may also be employing his own set of vague allusions to appeal to a particular subset of evangelical types without scaring away the rest of the people in the pews. Over at Daily Kos, dogemperor makes the case that Huckabee admires Bill Gothard. Huckabee has even proudly noted that he has been through Gothard's "Basic Seminar."

Gothard is not well-known outside of his particular fiefdom, but Huckabee's expressed admiration for him -- and Gothard's attendance at a Houston fundraiser for the candidate -- is deeply disturbing. You know how, say, Christopher Hitchens gets a case of the howling fantods any time he hears anyone from the religious right speak? That's how most evangelicals respond to Bill Gothard. At the fundamentalist Baptist, and very Republican****, church I grew up in Gothard's seminars were often criticized as a "cult."

It may simply be that, as a politician, Huckabee is willing to accept support from anyone who is willing to offer it. I haven't heard any reports that Huckabee's daughter has been ordered to remain single until age 30, after which she would be allowed to marry only with her father's permission (yes, that really is something the Gothardites I've encountered believe), or any other indications that the former governor is truly a Gothard devotee. So his praise of Gothard and the Basic Seminar might just be a politician's flattery -- just as his praise for the World's Worst Books after receiving Tim LaHaye's endorsement might not mean he's a full-blown prophecy maniac. But both of these instances give me pause. Huckabee talks like a run-of-the-mill evangelical, but if he's really a fan of both LaHaye and Gothard, then he may be something very different and far more troublesome.

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* Many evangelicals seem to think that the division of Proverbs into 31 chapters was divinely inspired as a sign that we should read a chapter of this book every day. That entails skipping the final chapter five months out of the year -- nothing against Lemuel, but hey, he's no Solomon, you know? Contemporary evangelical piety might be a very different thing if the book of Ecclesiastes had also been divided into 31 chapters.

** I've kept one of these pocket-sized volumes in the glove compartment of my car ever since the day I found myself unexpectedly at a hospital bedside needing, but not having with me, the 23rd Psalm, and Psalm 139, and Romans 8, and 1 Corinthians 15. It turns out it's also a good thing to keep in one's glove compartment because troopers tend to look closely at everything you're pulling out of there when they ask to see your registration and proof of insurance.

*** And thanks for the kind words and plugs.

**** Except for Cindy's mom. But we kept an eye on her.

King and Huck

Today would have been the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr.'s 78th birthday.

That honorific -- "reverend" -- refers to King's vocation as an ordained Baptist minister. He was the pastor of Dexter Avenue Baptist Church in Montgomery, Ala. But King believed his ministry extended beyond his congregation. He believed that God had called him to work for justice not just in the hearts and lives of the believers at Dexter Avenue, but in all of Montgomery, in all of Alabama, in all of America and even, ultimately, in all of the world.

And today, on what would have been the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr.'s 78th birthday, I read this MSNBC account of recent comments by another Baptist minister, former Arkansas Governor Mike Huckabee on "The Constitution and God's Standards" (thanks, mmackmcc and Tonio, for the tip):

"[Some of my opponents] do not want to change the Constitution, but I believe it's a lot easier to change the Constitution than it would be to change the word of the living God, and that's what we need to do is to amend the Constitution so it's in God's standards rather than try to change God's standards," Huckabee said, referring to the need for a constitutional human life amendment and an amendment defining marriage as between a man and a woman.

It's nice to hear Huckabee concede that same-sex marriage is, in fact, constitutional, and thus that outlawing it would require a constitutional amendment, but that's not the main point here.

The main point here is sweet fancy Moses this guy wants to rewrite the Constitution to align it with his idea of "God's standards"!

So, OK then, here's one Baptist minister who sets out to change America, leads a march on the nation's capital, and succeeds in changing the law of the land. And here's another Baptist minister who has set out to change America and to rewrite the laws of the land. So what's the difference? Why do I admire and honor the former while mocking the latter as a theocratic goof? Is it just because one was a liberal and the other a conservative?

Actually, the difference between the two cases is huge. One could almost say these two cases are opposites. King offered secular arguments in sectarian language. Huckabee is offering sectarian arguments in (mostly) secular language.

I mention their use of religious language here because that's what quite a few people get tripped up on. Religious or sectarian language is not itself the issue. Religious language can be a stumbling block in the secular realm of politics because it is not a universally shared language. King's language was steeped in religion. Quotations and allusions from the Bible, from Christian hymns and gospel songs, infused all of King's public speech. Huckabee simply can't compare. Like most of the leaders of the religious right and most of the politicians who court their favor, he is far more likely to talk about the Bible than he is to quote from it. Yet while Huckabee's use of religious language is both rarer and shallower than King's use of such language, it stands out more. It stands out because, as Huckabee uses it, it is exclusively sectarian language. He does not, as King always did, translate that language into shared, nonsectarian principles* because unlike King he has no shared, nonsectarian argument in mind, and unlike King he is not employing this language in service of a shared, nonsectarian agenda.

King's biblical oratory and Huckabee's bibliolatrous babble serve very different arguments. King's argument was ultimately a secular one: a call for justice in accord with the biblical prophets but also, even more so, in accord with the rights guaranteed in the Constitution. Huckabee's argument is ultimately a religious one: a call for the Constitution to be re-written in accord with the (alleged) fiats of his faith.

Those are very different. It is in no way inconsistent to endorse the former while opposing the latter. In fact, it would be inconsistent not to.

Ira Chernus explores this in a Common Dreams essay, "Faith and Politics: Rules of the Game. Chernus asks what we mean when we object to someone "trying to impose their religion" on us:

Was Dr. King trying to impose his religion upon the southern racists when he demanded integration because blacks, too, are “children of God”? More recently, progressive faith-based coalitions have won living wage campaigns. The small businessmen who must pay their help higher wages may well feel that their freedom is curtailed due to someone else’s religious beliefs. Is it fair to complain that “they’re imposing their religion on us” when gay marriage is banned, but not when racial integration or a living wage is required? We need to think this through carefully.

The real conflict between religion and politics in a democracy comes not from what people say or do but how they talk about it and the authority they invoke for it.

The underlying premise of democracy is that we human beings get to choose our laws and policies, not discover them inscribed in the cosmos. The rules a community lives by are produced by that community, and by no one or nothing else. Any law or policy is fair game, as long as it is constitutional and achieved through the democratic process.

... Any belief, statement, or action can be religious if it claims some transcendent or supernatural authority for its truth. Believing in life after death or giving alms to the poor is no more intrinsically religious than praying for a million dollars, dancing around a tree, or robbing a bank. As long as you say “Hey, I didn’t just think this up on my own. I know it’s right and true because some eternal transcendent authority told me so,” it’s religious. And that means it can never be challenged or change.

But challenge and change is the essence of democracy. The only valid authority for political values is the truth discovered by human thought, which is always open to challenge and change. Democracy requires that all the people (either directly or through elected representatives) be thinking and debating about their laws and policies, constantly and endlessly. Every claim made in the political arena must be open to debate without limit.

And the debate must be open to everyone. No one’s ideas can be excluded. So everyone must have equal access to the terms of the discussion. No special terms, like the words and symbols of a particular religion, can be privileged, because that would exclude all the people who don’t find those words and symbols meaningful. The terms have to be secular.

Those who base their political values on their religion have to translate faith statements into value statements that non-believers can evaluate and debate in rational terms. That’s what Dr. King did. ...

The majority of people who bring their faith into politics, on the right as well as the left and center, translate that faith into statements of value couched in more or less secular terms. The critical question is whether they allow open-ended challenge and debate, or whether they claim “Hey, you can’t challenge this because we didn’t make it up. It comes from a transcendent authority than can never change and never be challenged.”

If you hear that, it’s fair to say “Religion out of politics!” Because at that point the only response adherents of another faith or none at all can make is, “I don’t believe you.” Then there’s nothing more to say. The conversation comes to a dead end. And that means the democratic process comes to an end.

Huckabee fails Chernus' "critical question." By stating, explicitly, that he wants "to amend the Constitution so it's in God's standards" he is saying, precisely, "You can't challenge this because it comes from a transcendent authority that can never be challenged." His approach is defiantly unconstitutional and profoundly undemocratic. To accuse him of endorsing theocracy here is simply to quote him accurately.

The problem with Huckabee's statement is not that I disagree with him about same-sex marriage. The problem is that Huckabee doesn't care if I, or you, or anyone else, disagrees with him. His approach does not allow disagreement -- indeed, he says, to disagree with him is to disagree with God.

Most opponents of same-sex marriage will try at least to present an argument that relies on something other than their personal conviction that they have heard the voice of God and must impose the divine sanction upon the rest of the world. They will argue, for instance, that same-sex marriage would have bad consequences. By somehow eroding the Institution of Marriage or undermining The Family: Building Block of Society, they argue, same-sex marriage would lead to harmful consequences for society (dogs and cats ... mass hysteria, etc.). Whether or not those arguments make perfect sense, or are consistent with the facts, or bear any relation to the actual consequences, the point here is that those arguments are not sectarian. I think they're wrong, but I do not think they're illegitimate.

Huckabee's argument is illegitimate. He explicitly -- and proudly -- seeks to impose his religion on the rest of us. That's out of bounds. That is theocracy, not democracy. King knew the difference. Huckabee doesn't.

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* King was southern and Baptist, but he was not a Southern Baptist, so unlike Huckabee he was accustomed to viewing the Bible in terms of its larger themes and moral principles. Huckabee comes from the evangelical tradition of "literalism," which thinks primarily in terms of discrete precepts and propositions and has a very hard time discerning larger themes or principles. This is a serious handicap for evangelicals in the public sphere. They're equipped to prooftext, but not well-equipped to formulate arguments basic on overarching principles, and almost wholly incapable of translating such arguments into secular language or of basing them on shared, nonsectarian principles.

Road to ruin

I've long admired (abstractly, from afar) the kind of piety and devotion described in Brother Lawrence's The Practice of the Presence of God (the full text is online here) or the idea of Frank Laubach's "game with minutes" as described in his Letters by a Modern Mystic. Such efforts to find the holy in the mundane and to seek an attitude of love and prayer for everyone we encounter seem saintly in the best sense.*

God knows as well that I'm never further from sainthood then when I'm driving in traffic. Loving prayer is not my first response to the guy tailgating me, or the guy doing 50 in the left lane, or the SUV-drivers who don't use turn signals when changing lanes. So the idea of treating an Interstate as something holy -- a place where, in Laubach's words, I am "as wide open to people and their need as I am toward God" -- seems to me like it could be a Good Thing.

But this is something else entirely: "Christians Movement Calls I-35 a 'Highway of Holiness.'" (Thanks to Andrew B. for the tip.):

People drive on it every day, sometimes cursing along the way, but thousands of people consider Interstate 35 to be a holy road.

The highway that stretches from Laredo to Duluth, Minn., has grabbed the attention of Christians across the country, including those in Austin. Members of Christian groups along the I-35 corridor said the highway was mentioned in the Bible, and in order to fulfill a prophecy, it needs a little saving first.

According to Light the Highway, the worldwide movement is driving thousands to prayer on the interstate. Christians said the Old Testament's book of Isaiah prophesizes I-35 will be the United States' "Highway of Holiness."

Isaiah 35:8 reads: "And a highway will be there; it will be called the Way of Holiness. The unclean will not journey on it; it will be for those who walk in that Way; wicked fools will not go about on it."

"Everything we do, we want to make sure scripture is backing us up," said Austin's PromiseLand Church Pastor Charlie Lujan. "I-35 being Isaiah 35, it just matched."

OK, so maybe this is just a bit of whimsical wordplay. Maybe this I-35 = Isaiah 35 notion is just a playful way of finding a hook for a renewed emphasis on prayer. I mean, it's just not possible that this guy really thinks that the English titles, modern chapter divisions, and the naming conventions of the interstate highway system should be considered as inspired holy writ.

Or maybe it is. Reading on, it doesn't seem like Lujan and his Light the Highway effort are a terribly whimsical or playful bunch. Isaiah 35 is a joyous expression of millennial hope** but, like our friends LaHaye and Jenkins, these folks don't seem interested in such promises of future restoration and healing. They're all about the judgment and the purifying fire. They seem to like Isaiah 35:8 only because of its condemnation of "wicked fools" and "the unclean," by which they don't mean the invading armies of Babylon but -- what else? -- the gay menace:

Lujan conducted a five-week 24-hour prayer vigil and organized what he called a "purity siege" along Austin's famed Sixth Street. The sieges are part of the I-35 project, a nationwide movement to save those at bars, gay clubs and abortion clinics in cities along the interstate.

"If you just draw a line right down the middle of the nation, and go to these strategic cities along the way and just cry out holiness and purity, we believe there's going to be a referendum, a change, a radical change in our nation," Lujan said.

What, you may be wondering, is a "purity siege"? It's helpfully defined here as:

A spiritual demonstration. In much the same way people protest against governmental or business aspects of society, youth across the nation will “siege” sites of impurity in their city, by doing on-location prayer. They will be protesting the machinations of evil, such as pornography, injustice, abortion and other strongholds. They will stand outside of spiritual strongholds and visually demonstrate their opposition thereof, while doing warfare in heavenly realm.

Light the Highway (read that not as "illuminate" but as "incinerate") recounts a recent "siege," conducted in September in Dallas:

Fifty or so young people have gathered on Oak Lawn Avenue, positioning themselves on the sidewalk outside of JR’s Bar and Grill, one of many nightclubs found in this neighborhood, which is well-known for its large population of homosexuals. The group stays in a tight circle, praying and singing worship songs and asking God for holiness. They are there to confront the spirit of perversion and siege unholiness. ...

As the Siege continues, the power of God falls, and the young people start evangelizing, talking to, and praying for people including homosexuals, transgender and transvestites. They share with them how God loves them, and through the power of Jesus Christ, they can be set free from their sinful lifestyle. The purpose of the Siege was not to communicate a message of hate or exclusion, but rather, a message of love, forgiveness, acceptance and freedom.

Because, you know, nothing says "love, forgiveness, acceptance and freedom" like a siege and a "tight circle ... asking God for holiness."

The response is overwhelming as people begin to fall on the ground under the power of the Holy Spirit.

I'm not sure who I feel worse for here -- the patrons of JR's harassed by the everything-but-snake-handling prayer meeting on their sidewalk, or the "young people" corralled into this awkwardly aggressive form of "radical evangelism." The youth leader who organized this expedition, in my opinion, has a millstone-necklace with his name on it.

My own church youth group never laid siege to a gay bar, but I still wince when I recall some of our forays into "radical" evangelism. We did "boardwalk evangelism" down the shore. I personally handed a gospel tract to Madame Marie herself. Unlike the many mission trips our youth group also did, that wasn't something I enjoyed at the time or felt proud about afterward.

This is the dynamic at work in so much of what fundamentalist and evangelical churches think of as "youth ministry." Tell a bunch of good church kids what God expects of them and they will do their best to comply. Tell them God wants them to pass out tracts to strangers and they'll go along. Tell them God wants them to lay siege to a nightclub and they'll get on the van. They will go along because their conscience will be telling them that if this is what God would have them do, then it is what they ought to do. But their conscience will also be telling them that this seems not just awkward or intimidating, but wrong. "Be bold and courageous for God," the youth minister will tell them, but they're not balking out of fear, they're hesitating out of guilt. That will, in turn, provoke another crisis of conscience as they wonder what's wrong with them that makes them feel like right is wrong.

You can only stretch that rubber band so many times before it snaps and one of two things will happen. They may decide that their conscience cannot be trusted and thus will stop listening to it, becoming the sort of people who will one day grow up to lead another generation of young people in another round of purity sieges. Or their conscience will win out and they will have their Huckleberry Finn moment:

It was a close place. I took it up, and held it in my hand. I was a-trembling, because I'd got to decide, forever, betwixt two things, and I knowed it. I studied a minute, sort of holding my breath, and then says to myself:

"All right, then, I'll go to Hell" -- and tore it up.

It was awful thoughts and awful words, but they was said. And I let them stay said; and never thought no more about reforming. ... And for a starter I would go to work and steal Jim out of slavery again; and if I could think up anything worse, I would do that, too; because as long as I was in, and in for good, I might as well go the whole hog.

Some few of those who snap in the latter direction may eventually come to realize that what God wants is not necessarily the same as what God's alleged spokesmen say it is, and thus they may wind up rejecting only the advice of the spokesmen, and not rejecting God entirely. But many won't make that distinction.

This happens all the time. It's happening, right now, for many of those poor kids from that Dallas youth group that laid siege to JR's. If you find yourself driving on I-35, say a prayer for them.

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* And not in the sense of one of my favorite old jokes: What is a saint? A person who always, always, always does the Right Thing. What is a martyr? A person who has to live with a saint.

** As such it's also the inspiration for one of my favorite Wesleyan hymns, "O for a Thousand Tongues To Sing": Hear Him, ye deaf; His praise ye dumb, / Your loosened tongues employ; / Ye blind, behold your Savior come, / And leap, ye lame, for joy.

Charlie's Angels

Project Angel Tree is a Good Thing. Or it would be a Good Thing if the people running it would just get out of the way.

The program, part of Charles Colson's Prison Fellowship, collects and distributes Christmas presents for the children of prisoners. This is heartwarming and noncontroversial. It's also a fine example of Matthew 25-style Christianity in action: "I was in prison and you came to visit me." What's not to like?

Well, it turns out there's a problem. The folks at Prison Fellowship want to help these little kids at Christmas, but not quite as much as they want to spread the Gay-Hatin' Gospel.

Trent W. alerted me to this story via e-mail. It seems the Friends Congregational Church of College Station, Texas, is no longer allowed to collect Christmas presents for the children of prisoners. The United Church of Christ congregation had been supporting Angel Tree for 10 years before they were told this fall that their help was no longer wanted.

Initially Friends Congregational was told that this was because they were in conflict with Prison Fellowship's "Statement of Faith." Had that been true, it would have been strange enough. After all, you're not required to swear the Marine Corps Oath before your donation will be accepted by Toys for Tots. But it turns out that wasn't the real problem.

The real problem, as this letter from the church to Prison Fellowship (.pdf) explains, was that Friends Congregational doesn't hate gay people enough:

The [Prison Fellowship] representative, however, informed [Pastor Dan De Leon] that according to our church’s Web site, we are an Open & Affirming congregation. Friends Congregational Church has publicly upheld this stance since 1996 as a clear, unapologetic means of extending an extravagant welcome* to all in our community, regardless of social status, gender, ethnicity or sexual orientation. The representative went on to say that the Board viewed homosexuality as deviancy from Scripture, and this position, when held up to our Open & Affirming identity, excluded us from the Angel Tree Ministry. Although one might read between the lines of the letter we received to come to this conclusion, this detail by which Friends has been excluded is not found in the assertion that we must be Trinitarian and uphold the Bible in all matters of faith and life; nor is this wording clearly offered anywhere in the Prison Fellowship’s Statement of Faith.

The letter recommends that Prison Fellowship should state more clearly "the criteria by which it claims that churches and millions of their faithful congregants are to be excluded from assisting the imprisoned and their children, who, consequently, will not receive joy and love in the form of gifts at Christmas." Ouch. The problem, of course, is that Prison Fellowship thought they had stated this criteria clearly with that bit about "upholding the Bible in all matters of faith and life." They assumed that "uphold the Bible" means the same thing as "excessive contempt and unloving attitudes towards gays and lesbians." That is, after all, the "most common perception" of American Christianity.

The letter goes on to pose three questions for the straight and extremely narrow ministry:

1) To the child whose parent is in prison, does it matter who is providing him or her with gifts at Christmas?

2) Is God displeased that a gay man or woman goes Christmas shopping for a child orphaned by society, or is God overjoyed that a child such as this is receiving love mirrored after God's love: expecting nothing in return?

3) Finally, at the end of the day, does it really help or does it hinder the mission of Angel Tree Ministry to disqualify churches like ours on the basis of an anonymous giver being, as you suggest, deviant from Scripture? If you feel that it helps, then we are sad to say that you have your work cut out for you, because all of us sinners who breathe God’s good air deviate from Scripture every day. This includes everyone from our congregation to the well-intentioned members of the Prison Fellowship Board.

I've got nothing to add to that except perhaps this: Don't mess with those UCC folks. They seem all meek and mild, but get between them and the people they're trying to help and they'll dope-slap you upside your self-righteous head.

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* "Extravagant welcome." I like that. When I use that, a lot, in the future, you'll know that this is where I got it from.

Identity Theft

"Concern trolling" predates the Internet. Consider, for example, the "lifelong" letter to the editor. I'm sure if we dug through 19th-century newspaper archives, we'd find letters to the editor that begin, "As a lifelong member of the Whig Party ..." and go on from there to express concern about and disapproval of all things Whiggish.

This bit of duplicitous dirty-trickery probably dates back to Roman times. It wouldn't surprise me if archaeologists found the first-century equivalent of a letter to the editor written by a Sadducee that began, "As a lifelong Pharisee ..."

Wikipedia's definition of a "concern troll" is, delightfully and predictably, tagged as "disputed," but I find it useful:

A concern troll is a pseudonym created by a user whose point of view is opposed to the one that the user's sockpuppet claims to hold. The concern troll posts in Web forums devoted to its declared point of view and attempts to sway the group's actions or opinions while claiming to share their goals, but with professed "concerns." The goal is to sow fear, uncertainty and doubt within the group.

The concern troll's disingenuous claim of belonging attacks essential matters of identity. The CT's dubious assertion of membership is not motivated by a desire to belong to the group, or by a genuine respect for what that group is or what it stands for. The CT, instead, is posing as a member in order to change the identity and the definition of the group, and thereby to undermine it.

It's a common tactic, but an effective and corrosive one, which is why the whiff of concern-trollery raises red flags and unlikely claims of membership or identity tend to be viewed with extreme suspicion.

Consider, for example, the case of the wonderful Anne Lamott, author of the spiritual memoirs Traveling Mercies and Grace. Lamott is as Jesus-y an evangelical Christian as you'll ever meet. It's impossible to read those books without acknowledging that her life is shaped and guided by what we evangelical types call a "personal relationship with Jesus." Yet many evangelicals would view her impish impiousness and, even more so, her progressive politics, as wholly alien to evangelical Christianity. There's a sense, in other words, in which she clearly seems to be an evangelical Christian and a sense in which she clearly seems to be something else.

The question "is Anne Lamott an evangelical?" is, at least partly, a matter of semantics, since it necessarily raises the follow-up question of how we define "evangelical" (a notoriously difficult and slippery question). But it doesn't feel like a matter of mere semantics for anyone involved. Lamott says she is, and this claim is, for her, an important aspect of her identity. Others who find her politics literally anathema tend to view her claim with suspicion, fearing that it may be the deceptive tactic of the concern troll and a threat to an important aspect of their identity.

I can appreciate both points of view. I can certainly relate to Lamott. I've had a long and public lover's quarrel with my own evangelical Christian heritage and I know what it is like to have one's claims of identity questioned and challenged, to be told that one doesn't really belong. But I've also had enough experience with the bogus claims of concern trolls who have sought to undermine other aspects of identity that are important to me -- from modern-day Dixie-crats to the sham environmentalism of Bjorn Lomborg and his ilk -- that I understand the gatekeepers' suspicions as well.

All of the above is a long preface to my thanks for the many thoughtful and honest points of view expressed in comments to the previous post regarding the dispute over Mormonism's relationship to Christianity. The Mormon choice to identify as "Christian" does not seem to me a likely or an easy fit, but it also does not seem to me to have anything to do with the malicious dishonesty of the concern troll. It strikes me, rather, as being motivated by a desire to claim a share of the cultural acceptance and legitimacy that Christianity enjoys here in America. As such, even if one views this claim as mostly vicarious, it pays a compliment of sorts to Christianity. It would be churlish of me, as a non-Mormon Christian, to respond to that compliment with a blanket rejection.

So while I remain a bit unsettled by and about this claim, I think it's helpful to recognize the role semantics plays in this question as well. As the back and forth in comments to previous post demonstrates, there are senses in which the claim can be viewed as accurate and senses in which it can be viewed as inaccurate.

That being the case, and me being in the unfortunate position of Not Knowing Everything, it's probably best to conclude without a conclusion and move on to other topics.

How's that for anticlimactic?

The Toady

Here's why Mitt Romney's "Faith in America" speech is backfiring: Bullies don't respect their toadies.

The speech includes some decent stretches, but it was not, primarily, a courageous plea for religious tolerance and mutual respect. It was, instead, primarily an obsequious bit of sucking up by an outsider hoping to curry favor with the in crowd by parroting their condemnation of other outsiders.

Romney's appeal was directed at the evangelical Republican voting bloc -- in particular to the "America is a Christian nation" crowd. He set the tone with this David Barton-ish riff:

There are some who may feel that religion is not a matter to be seriously considered in the context of the weighty threats that face us. If so, they are at odds with the nation's founders, for they, when our nation faced its greatest peril, sought the blessings of the Creator.

That prefaces the heart of the speech, a somewhat garbled rehash of the religious right's use of "accommodationist" arguments as a Trojan horse:

... In recent years, the notion of the separation of church and state has been taken by some well beyond its original meaning. They seek to remove from the public domain [sic] any acknowledgment of God. Religion is seen as merely a private affair with no place in public life. It is as if they are intent on establishing a new religion in America -- the religion of secularism. They are wrong.

The founders proscribed the establishment of a state religion, but they did not countenance the elimination of religion from the public square. We are a nation "Under God" and in God, we do indeed trust.

We should acknowledge the Creator as did the Founders -- in ceremony and word. He should remain on our currency, in our pledge, in the teaching of our history, and during the holiday season, nativity scenes and menorahs should be welcome in our public places. Our greatness would not long endure without judges who respect the foundation of faith upon which our Constitution rests. I will take care to separate the affairs of government from any religion, but I will not separate us from "the God who gave us liberty."

Nor would I separate us from our religious heritage. ...

Romney's use of the dog-whistle term "heritage" is another Barton-ish touch, reinforcing the godandcountry civil religious theme of the preceding paragraphs. That bit about "judges who respect the foundation of faith" seems like a shout-out to the Roy Moore lunatic fringe.

For a religious minority like Romney, this is playing with fire. People like Barton and Moore don't like people like Mitt Romney. They consider Mormons a threat to their imagined "Christian nation" -- just as much of a threat as "secular humanists." For these people -- the target audience of Romney's speech -- Mormons and atheists are not real Americans. Romney lacks the courage or the conviction to challenge their narrow, revisionist, unconstitutional construct of Christian America, so instead he attempts to squirm his way inside their exclusive circle.

Romney's gambit here comes straight from the school yard. As a Mormon, he is an outsider, getting picked on by the bullies of the religious right. Instead of standing up to the bullies, he sucks up to them, trying to prove his loyalty and win their approval by acting like them and picking on the other outcasts and outsiders. "You guys want to pretend that 'secular' and 'profane' are synonyms? I can do that. Look, I'll even beat up this atheist kid for you. See? I'm just like you guys!"

This desperate, canine obsequiousness infuses his sniveling speech with fearfulness and flopsweat. Romney is pleading, begging to be allowed to serve as the bullies' toady. As far as that goes, he has probably succeeded. Eager-to-please toadies can come in handy, so the bullies will probably be willing to accept him in that capacity.

But as useful as they may sometimes be, toadies are never liked, respected or admired by the bullies. Nobody likes or respects or admires an unprincipled coward. And the characteristics of a successful toady don't fit with anybody's notion of the characteristics of a potential president. A toady can't get elected president (the best he can hope for is a Connecticut senate seat).

Hence the speech is backfiring. I don't know enough about the relative importance of the religious right in the Republican Iowa caucuses to speculate on what this speech will mean for Romney there on Jan. 14 Jan. 3, but wherever that voting bloc is strong, he will lose.

Are you there, God? It's me, Huckabee

Via The Sinner's Guide: Mike Huckabee's phone call from God.

To paraphrase Lloyd Bentsen: Governor, you're no Bob Newhart.

The occasion here was a 2004 Republican Governor's Association dinner. Huckabee, a former Baptist minister, was called upon to give an invocation -- that is, to offer a prayer. Instead, he answers his ringing cell phone and pretends to be responding to a call from God.

The comedy here is bewildering.

"God" asks for President Bush's autograph on behalf, Huckabee says, of Samson. Get it? Samson's a Bible character, so he must be up in Heaven with God and, like everyone in Heaven, a big fan of George W. Bush. Or something. The joke wouldn't work no matter which biblical character he'd plugged in there -- obsequious hagiography is inherently unfunny -- but one still has to ask: Why Samson?

The joke seems intended as praise for Bush, but the Samson reference turns this on its head. If you untangle this joke from Huckabee's clumsy delivery, the basic structure of it is something like: "President Bush is so _____________ that Samson asked for his autograph!" Yet the story of Samson doesn't provide any flattering possibilities for filling in the blank there. (Bush is so ... fond of prostitutes? Bad at riddles? Enthusiastic about suicide-bombing?) The joke is so poorly conceived you almost have to think it's meant as some kind of meta-joke at Bush's expense.

Even worse than the "comedy" here is the trap Huckabee sets for himself of having to deliver a verbatim message from God. He might have avoided this if he had concluded by quoting some bit of scripture -- "What's that, Lord? You want us to act justly and to love mercy and walk humbly with you?" That, at least, wouldn't have involved putting words into God's mouth, which is what Huckabee wound up doing with his conclusion, in which he says that God, via cell phone, tells the Republican Governors to:

"Take care of the Family, and Marriage, and the people of America, and all the people, and the children."

Thus making God sound like an inarticulate contestant in some kind of Republican beauty pageant, spouting random buzzwords in the hopes that one of them might be the right answer.

The creepiest thing about this whole ill-conceived comedy-routine-in-lieu-of-prayer is that it never occurred to Huckabee or to anyone in his audience that if you've got God on the line, maybe you should ask some questions.

All of which is to say that this here's an open thread with the starting-point topic being: What would you ask?