The hospitality of saints

St. Remigius -- "apostle to the Franks" and the Archbishop of Reims (437-533) -- in a chapel on top of Wurmlingen Berg. The chapel is named after Remigius, though what connection he has to the hilltop church in Southern Germany I do not know.

St. Remigius' day, coincidentally, is tomorrow.

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'Going to glory'

A notebook preacher.

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'Stop the car'

In its opening weekend a year ago, Courageous, an independent Christian film produced by the film-making ministry of a Ga. Baptist church, brought in more than $9 million in ticket sales. Nearly $8,000 tickets were sold per theater showing the film. The film's budget was only $2 million, in part because half the actors were church volunteers.

Courageous earned eight times its budget in 10 days.

In the four months before Courageous was released on DVD, ticket sales in the US reached a total of more than $34 million.

All of which is only by way of assessing cultural impact.

The director, Alex Kendrick, whose title at the church where he works is associate pastor of media, has been quoted as saying: "They say we're preaching to the choir, but you know what? Sometimes the choir needs a good reminder."

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The religious shape of capitalism

A new study published in Management Science is making a very Max Weber-like claim about the essential differences of religions affecting engagements with capitalism & shaping capitalism.

According to the University of Georgia and Southern Methodist University study, mutual funds are done differently in areas dominated by Catholics than they are in areas dominated by Protestants. The study says that difference is best explained by the respective natures of the different versions of Christianity.

From the abstract:

"Funds located in low-Protestant or high-Catholic areas exhibit significantly higher fund return volatilities. [...] Risk-taking associated with local religious beliefs manifests in higher portfolio concentrations, higher portfolio turnover, more aggressive interim trading, and more "tournament" risk-shifting behaviors, but not over-weighting risky individual stocks. Overall, our results suggest that local religious beliefs have significant influences on mutual fund behaviors."

One of the study's authors told CNN that Baptists in particular make a difference.

The theory, here, is that Baptists are more suspicious of promises of "great solutions" and "great returns," and that, in certain concentrations, that suspicion is adopted by the whole culture.

It will be interesting to see if this holds up & how far the study goes in attempting to explain the data. There's a real statistical difference, apparently, but the more useful/interesting part of the study for religion will be if there's any good argument as to why. Weber's own version of this idea that religion shapes economics, which was an inversion of Marx's claim, has the tendency to seem really persuasive on a certain level, but to not withstand a lot of detailed historical analysis.

A bit of Weber, from the classic The Protestant Work Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism, written in 1904 and '05:

"[I]t is a fact that the Protestants (especially certain branches of the movement to be fully discussed later) both as ruling classes and as ruled, both as majority and as minority, have shown a special tendency to develop economic rationalism which cannot be observed to the same extent among Catholics either in the one situation or in the other. Thus the principal explanation of this difference must be sought in the permanent intrinsic character of their religious beliefs, and not only in their temporary external historico-political situations."

"[...] one might be tempted to express the difference by saying that the greater other-worldliness of Catholicism, the ascetic character of its highest ideals, must have brought up its adherents to a greater indifference toward the good things of this world. Such an explanation fits the popular tendency in the judgment of both religions. On the Protestant side it is used as a basis of criticism of those (real or imagined) ascetic ideals of the 'Catholic way of life,' while the Catholics answer with the accusation that materialism results from the secularization of all ideals through Protestantism."

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When a Nazi converts to Islam

He wore a beard, but not a full beard.

He walked to prayers at the nearby mosque.

He read the Quran, but in his own native German rather than the original Arabic.

These are the hints we have to the content of the new-found faith of a dying Nazi. The few facts. They are cryptic, almost incidental, and stubbornly ambiguous. The Nazi doctor known as Dr. Death and the Butcher of Mauthausen spent the last dozen years of his life as a Muslim. He converted, and declared himself changed, a man of faith. What that means, though, is anything but clear.

The 50-year hunt for Aribert Ferdinand Heim ended last week when a German court in Baden Baden decreed he died in Egypt in 1992. Evidence Heim died in Cairo emerged three years ago, but was only confirmed by district court judges on Friday, as reported by Der Spiegel and the New York Times.

With that ruling, certain facts about Heim's years in hiding become clear:

It's known he fled in 1962, abandoning his wife and son and his gynecology practice in Southern Germany when investigators came to his house while he wasn’t home, escaping prosecution for war crimes. He went to France, then Spain, Morocco, Libya, and finally to Cairo on a tourist visa. He changed his name to Tarek Hussein Farid. He learned Arabic and lived in a hotel, away from the other Western ex-pats and the small community of Germans in the more middle class neighborhoods. He converted in Islam in 1980.

But “he converted” meaning what, exactly?

Aribert Heim, as shown in his passport.

For the last few years, though we know now he was already dead, Heim has been the most wanted Nazi. He was named "Dr. Death" for his brutality in a concentration camp during the Holocaust. According to witnesses, he was more than an eager participant in the Third Reich's machinery of death. A Wafen-SS doctor, Heim tortured the concentration camp inmates with impunity. He "experimented" sadistically. Witnesses said he removed organs without anesthesia, timed deaths on his stop watch as his victims screamed in pain, and preserved Jews’ skulls for use as souvenir paperweights. He injected water, gasoline and various poisons into people's hearts, and watched while they died.

In the words of the court ruling closing the case last week, Heim was wanted because,

"als Revierarzt im österreichischen Konzentrationslager Mauthausen im Zeitraum Oktober bis November 1941 in zahlreichen Fällen Häftlinge durch Spritzen oder nicht notwendige Operationen grausam getötet zu haben."

"as district physician in the Austrian concentration camp Mauthausen, in the period between October and November 1941, in numerous cases, detainees were cruelly killed through injections or unnecessary operations."

As late as 1979, Heim was actively denying these charges. He said it was all a conspiracy, that Germany just wanted a scapegoat, and that the witnesses were lying, as he’d only been a doctor for the soldiers. He was reportedly seriously considering returning to Germany to face the charges. Notes and documents found in 2009 show Heim was trying to work out and solidify his defense. He appears to have spent some considerable amount of time in his Cairo rooms, attempting to make his case on paper. "What crueler deed could one accuse a doctor of than these brutalities and bestialities?" he wrote.

At least part of his defense, however, some 30 years after the end of the war, was a rant about Jews. He saw Jewish conspiracies at work in the world, and thought, apparently, his own innocence was proven by such anti-semitism. Weren’t the Jews to blame for student uprisings in 1968, when “the young Khazars Dutschke and Cohn-Bendit propagated their anarchist ideas”? Was no one paying attention to the atrocities of Zionism in Palestine? Weren’t the Jews really to blame for the Holocaust? It was, after all, the old Nazi scribbled, “The Jewish Khazar, [and the] Zionist lobby of the U.S. [who] were the first ones who in 1933 declared war against Hitler's Germany.”

During these years, Heim was working a series of reports on “Antisemitism,” “a general review on the true identity of the Khazars.” Between 1977 and ’78, using a pseudonym, he sent this to German media outlets and German leaders, such as Helmut Kohl, to several American media outlets, and a long list of U.S. leaders, starting with the First Lady at the time, Rosalynn Carter. Heim’s notes say copies were sent to more than a dozen U.S. Senators, including Tip O’Neil, Robert Byrd, Edward Kennedy, John Glenn (“Astronaut,” Heim noted), Orin Hatch, Mark Hatfield and Bob Dole.

In a cover letter to Newsweek, Heim claimed he wrote the reports because “historic facts should get the upper hand and justice should prevail in the politics.” A postscript demanded an answer as to why the news magazine was suppressing the truth. “Why we can not read the true history and true Identity of the Jewish-Khazar’s in your weekly, or are you under Zionist observance ( see report by G[eorge] Will 28.11.77)?” Heim wrote.

A young Egyptian who knew Heim at this time as “Uncle Tarek” reported it wasn’t clear to those around him why the German was in Cairo. He was, however, thought to be “in dispute with maybe the Jews.”

It was a year after these notebook rants and anti-semitic missives that Heim became Muslim. The documentation of this was confirmed by the Baden Baden court. As far as the court is concerned, his conversion was real, legally speaking.

Whether it marked a change in him is harder to ascertain.

In the news reports, this detail is presented in the context of his hiding. It’s one of the ways he stayed underground, hidden from the Nazi hunters who were following shreds of rumors around the globe, looking for Heim in Finland and Chile, Vietnam and Saudi Arabia.

Or was it more than a ruse?

There seem to be three possible interpretations of Heim’s conversion to Islam:

1. He didn’t change in his “conversion,” as it was merely as a matter of disguise. 
2. He changed. 
3. He did change, but not in the ways that might matter to those morally opposed to Fascism and the Holocaust.

It seems that 1. is essentially an intuitive position, and would be very hard to support and very hard to falsify. Any detail that could support a conversion could just as easily be read as disguise. Each fact of religion and detail of practice can be actively doubted and alternatively interpreted as disingenuous, as a part of Heim’s façade. The question, it seems, is simply whether one believes it possible a Nazi – especially a Nazi who was as much of a Nazi as Heim – can change.

Conversely, 2. would seem to need to be based in optimism, an intuition, a strong belief that people can change. That optimism could be general, or attached to religion in general, as a place where people are transformed or empowered to be different than they are, or it could be attached to Islam in particular. If Islam is submission and order, jihad a “technology of the self,” then it could be the case that Heim found in this new faith a new habitus, a chance to be otherwise than he was. Whether or not his conversion is taken as “real” may depend just on whether or not one holds that conversion, in any important sense, is really possible.

But perhaps that change, if Heim changed, would have to be visible. Would have to mean an important change. Isn’t it the case, after all, that with “Dr. Death,” the change one would be interested in is very concrete, very specific? What one wants to find, if religion, Islam, or just people are to be thought of optimistically as able to become better, is not simply some “change,” but a change in the aging war criminal’s orientation towards his own horrific actions. A change, possibly, in his attitude towards Jews. A change, really, in his ability or willingness to acknowledge his own evilness.

The question is whether or not Heim found a new faith. To answer that, though, one has to decide what “conversion” is supposed to mean.

What is known about his conversion and his dozen years of Muslim piety, really, mostly, doesn’t serve to answer the question of change. The question just repeats: what would conversion really look like? It’s known that Heim “never missed a prayer at the mosque.” He fasted during Ramadan, when Muslims purify themselves in extensive fasting. He had his beard and read his Quran. He “was very ordered, exercise in the morning, then prayers at the main Al-Azhar mosque, and long sessions spent reading and writing while sitting on a rocking chair.”

In the end, thought, what does that tell us? Are those details the answer to the question?

At least in this instance, “change” and “conversion” and “faith,” to be worthwhile concepts to talk about, are going to need to mean something like a change of heart. A change of beliefs and practices too, to be sure, but more especially, more importantly, a reorientation towards the most important facts of Heim’s life, his participation in the Holocaust.

There is one important detail in the available information that supports the thought Heim didn’t change in this way, and didn’t abandon his ideology and anti-semitism. From that cache of documents, discovered in Cairo storage in 2009, there’s a letter dated to 1987, seven years after his conversion. Heim is writing to the Vatican on behalf of the Palestinians, arguing Jews have no right to a homeland in Palestine and have misrepresented their ethnicity in an elaborate, media-supported conspiracy, “this greatest 2nd millennium’s hoax,” in order to seize Palestine. The paranoia, the anti-semitism and theories of conspiracies of Jews are the same, here, as they were before his conversion.

Heim’s new faith apparently left at least this essential aspect of his Nazi outlook on the world untouched.

In the Vatican letter in 1987, Heim is even attempting to marshal evidence that the Holocaust has been greatly exaggerated. He claims conflicting census reports on the number of Jews in the world show there is a Zionist conspiracy, “a calculated mistake to demonstrate the colossal number of Jewish Khazars killed in WWII.”

So perhaps it was all a ruse, Heim’s conversion. Perhaps it was just one more way he integrated into the culture where he was hiding. Or, perhaps, after 18 years in Cairo he really did mark some difference and some change in his life, and did “really” convert, in the ways conversion is usually described, but it had no relation, no effect, no bearing on his anti-semitism, or his own actions as a Nazi doctor. Maybe he became a Muslim but still stayed a Nazi.

There are of course those who might see this as evidence for an intrinsic link between Islam and fascism. The intransigent anti-semitism of one Nazi convert says nothing, though, about the diversity of faiths that go under the name “Islam,” or even about the essential nature of the Islam that Heim claimed. His conversion can’t reasonably be interpreted as tarnishing the religion of more than two billion people, any more than the fact there were Nazis who were Catholics can be considered an important point about Catholicism.

What it does show is some of the ways in which “conversion” is thought of. And some the ambiguity in that concept. It can mean something strictly legal, something a document like the one the court examined and authenticated in Baden Baden serves to prove real. It can mean, also, the adoption of certain habits, and a habitus, things the converted do with their days. Or, alternatively, it can be demanded that the change, to be important, must be more than that: More than prayers and beards, more than “Muslim” written on a form.

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How the religious right really thinks?

In some quarters this Ralph Reed questionnaire is being reported as evidence of the true Religious Right zeitgeist. How things really are. This is how Reed frames the issue, the "Obama question" and this coming election, and that's supposed to mean that's how it really is for those Reed supposedly can get out to vote.

Reed is, after all, "Romney's best hope for rallying evangelical voters."

Or not.

I'm not much impressed by the Freudian-slip school of interpretation.


See this document that way, as accidental-true-secret-revealed, you miss the way this is also an argument being made specifically because there's some sizable group of the target audience that doesn't think this election is a big deal.

And you miss the way this is Reed trying to position himself as a relevant operative who should always get Republican money thrown at him.

How do we know this isn't just Reed mau-mauing, as much as it's anything?

As Tom Wolfe described the practice, when a different sort of "militant minority" was shaking down pols for contracts, it sure sounds a lot like Reed and this questionnaire of his:

"Going downtown to mau-mau the bureaucrats got to be the routine practice [...]. There was one genius in the art of confrontation who had mau-mauing down to what you could term a laboratory science. He had it figured out so he didn't even have to bring his boys downtown in person. He would just show up with a crocus sack full of revolvers, ice picks, fish knives, switchblades, hatchets, blackjacks, gravity knives, straight razors, hand grenades, blow guns, bazookas, Molotov cocktails, tank rippers, unbelievable stuff, and he'd dump it all out on somebody's shiny walnut conference table. He'd say 'These are some of the things I took off my boys last night ... I don't know, man ... [...] And they would lay money on this man's ghetto youth patrol like it was now or never ... [and] the bureaucrats felt like it was all real [...] like they were reaching all those hard-to-reach hard-to-hold hardcore hardrock blackrage badass furious funky ghetto youth.

Replace those furious funky ghetto youth with "the Religious Right" and the crocus sack of weapons with a reference to people thinking Obama is worse than Nazis, and Reed's your "one genius" at the Romney offices. Which must have worked OK, since this is a $10 million campaign.

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The dopplenamers of American religion

I happened across what's now one of my favorite American religion dopplenamers today, in a Denver Post story about students arrested while advocating for the legalization of marijuana.

Jonathan Edwards, protesting at the University of Colorado at Boulder:

Some other fantastic American religion dopplenamers:

• Jonathan Edwards, the winery.
• Robert Ingersoll, a primatologist involved with "Project Nim," and an activist for better treatment of primates.
• Dwight L. Moody, State Farm insurance agent.
• Charles Parham, sunglasses designer.

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He generally regretted

"Over on Second Street, the Methodist congregation was singing. The town of Bonners made no other sound. Grainier still went to services some rare times, when a trip to town coincided. People spoke nicely to him there, people recognized him from the days when he'd attended with Gladys, but he generally regretted going. He very often wept in church. Living up in the Moyea with plenty of small chores to distract him, he forgot he was a sad mad. When the hymns began, he remembered."

-- Denis Johnson, Train Dreams

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The Derrida point

"I was wondering myself where I am going. So I would answer you by saying, first, that I am trying, precisely, to put myself at a point so that I do not know any longer where I am going."

-- Jacques Derrida, in response to a question after his 1966 presentation of "Structure, Sign, and Play in the Discourse of the Human Sciences" at Johns Hopkins University, which was a critical event in the history of theory in the United States.

It's a funny comment because, from one standpoint, this is Derrida confirming & affirming a main line of attack on Derrida, that is that he is most essentially an obfuscationist. From another, tho., the comment is the enactment or demonstration of exactly the critical sort of problematic at issue in all of Derrida's thinking.

That is, the inherent internal instability of things.

The instability being such that "where I am going" is to "where I do not know where I am going," the latter being already inherent in the former, subverting it. The unstable state being such that the point is to get to the point of not knowing the point: the first "point," there, making the last problematic or even impossible, so that middle "point" is always frustratingly simultaneously both the point and not the point of knowing what the point is.

The comment, one cld say, both eats itself & is itself in the eating of itself. All at once: always already.

As Derrida says in "Structure, Sign, and Play in the Discourse of the Human Sciences," referring to something else but equally applicable here:

"This moment was that in which language invaded the universal problematic; that in which, in the absence of a center or origin, everything became discourse -- provided we can agree on this word -- that is to say, when everything became a system where the central signified, the original or transcendental signified, is never absolutely present outside a system of differences. The absence of transcendental signified extends the domain and the interplay of signification ad infinitum."

Or, as he also says, in the same piece:

"Language bears within itself the necessity of its own critique."

This includes -- also & especially -- in this "moment" & this "event" -- the language of the critique of the critique of the language of the critique, & so on & so on.

It's either brilliant & helpful & exciting or maddening & stupid, depending on one's standpoint.

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German prayers in America

Meeting notes taken in the late 1930s -- that seems to be the very last remnant of the German language in the history of the German United Evangelical Synod of the North America.

Everything official was in English, at that point. There was just one last meeting where one old churchman kept notes in German.

There is no German United Evangelical Synod of North America today. The church joined with the Reformed Church -- itself formerly the German Reformed Church -- in 1934. Then that church, the Evangelical and Reformed Church, joined with the Congregational Churches in 1957 to become the United Church of Christ. Even before that series of ecumenical mergers, though, what was once an immigrant church with a strong ethnic, "Old World" identity had accommodated and assimilated, jettisoning its Germanness, according to History of the Evangelical and Reformed Church, over the course of about 90 years.

That story is the story of immigrant assimilation in America.

The church began in St. Louis in the 1840s, a collection of immigrant congregations that defined themselves in opposition to the area's "ultra-Lutherans." These congregations adhered to the Heidelberg Catechism. The new church called itself a verein -- a union or an association -- and had a strong ethnic identity. Thought it existed only in the American Midwest, it formed with a German name: Der Deutche Evangelische Kirchenverein des Westens. After about 30 years, the church officially translated its name into English, re-christening itself in the late 1870s as the German United Evangelical Synod of North America.

Not quite two decades after that, in the 1890s, the church took the next major step in assimilation, following a course that was, by then, fairly well defined by other religious groups transplanted from Europe to North America: Sunday School curricula was switched to English. 

The catechism was put in English, then the church's hymnal, then, soon, the entire church was functioning in English, and the only remnant of the original language was those synod meeting notes, kept in German long after anyone needed them to be German.

Other groups were pressured to make the transition into English by war. Some Dutch Reformed churches faced serious social pressure to assimilate during World War I, for example. As James D. Bratt notes in Dutch Calvinism in Modern America, Christian Reformed Churches that continued preaching and praying in Dutch elicited outrage from "American neighbors unable to distinguish between 'Dutch' and 'Deutsch.'" Several Midwestern states actually passed laws prohibiting churches from holding services in any "foreign" language, unless full English translations had been given prior approval by the state legislature.

For the Kirschenverein, though, it wasn't nativists and nationalism behind the push to translate the church into English. It was religious competition. The big concern for the German United Evangelical Synod of the North America in the last decade of the 19th century: Lutherans.

The Lutherans had all their services in English at the time, and the Evangelical Synod leaders heard horror stories of youth across the Midwest abandoning the faith of their fathers and mothers for English-language Lutheranism.

It's a curious moment. A kind of tipping point for an immigrant community: there came a moment in the 1890s where, for a younger generation of German-Americans, churches they'd never attended more familiar, more inviting and less strange than the churches they'd grown up in, because of the issue of language.

The "religious marketplace" pushed the Evangelical Synod to adapt to America, in a sense, and so, about 50 years after it began, the immigrant church shed its immigrant language. For the sake of maintaining a connection to children and grandchildren. And 40 years after that, on the eve of the Second World War, the last remnant of the original language of the church was scribbled in synod meeting notes, and then was no more.

The Evangelical Synod was the last major German church to jettison its immigrant identity, one aspect of which was its language. By the time of the First World War, when Dutch pastors were finding their homes graffitied in "paint raids" with slogans such as "Be an American" and "Buy a Liberty Bond," the once-German churches in the American Midwest didn't really seem German anymore.

That wasn't the end of German-language worship in America, though. There are some small pockets of resistance to assimilation, and also ways in which assimilation has come to include, rather than exclude German-language prayer and worship. Assimilation, being what it is, doesn't seem to ever mean the total erasure of immigrant history. Instead there's a often kind of submersion, where "identity" becomes "heritage," which is another sort of identity.

It's accessible -- for what gets called, in cultural studies, "projects of the self" -- in part through the persistence of  culture tourism and "heritage" consumer products.

For German-Americans, this means "German villages" in California and Georgia, an annual "Wurstfest in Texas, and companies selling imported German food, German-style windows (made in America), and "authentic German garden gnomes."

In the back of one the last remaining German-language papers in the United States, Troy, Michigan's Nordamerikanische Wochen-Post, one can find four listing for German-language church services:

1. A Catholic Church in Detroit, St. Joseph's, where one can find "Feierliches Deutsches Hochamt mit geistlichem Gesang von deutschem Quartet (Die Minnesänger) an jedem vierten Sonntag des Monats um 10:30 Uhr morgen," "A solemn German high mass with spiritual singing from the German quartet (The Minstrals) on every fourth Sunday of the month at 10:30 a.m.," as well as a weekly German-language novena.
2. St. Peter's Lutheran Church in Warren, Michigan, which has a bilingual, German-English service every Sunday at 10 a.m., according to the Wochen-Post.
3. Gemeinde Gottes -- of a very small, strict Holiness denomination -- in Swartz Creek, Michigan, which seems to have retained German not as a preservation of heritage but as one way of maintaining a distinction from the surrounding culture and the churches deemed "apostate." They have a weekly "Bibel- und Gebetstunde" "Bible and prayer hour" in German, and a German-language service three Sunday evenings a month.
4. Benediction Lutheran Church, in Milwaukee, Wisconsin, where they hold one German-language service a month, "normalerweise" on the third Sunday of the month at 2 p.m.

Just as German-language prayers ended in the 1890s as a way for parents to maintain a connection with their children and grandchildren, German-language prayers continue today, in various ways, as a means of retaining continuity with generations past.

There's been a strong trend away from "denominational histories," in recent years. One doesn't have to dig too deep into the records of various denominations and religious traditions, though, to find all sorts of interesting, enlightening aspects of American history, and "the American experience." Church history becomes immigration history becomes war-time conflict or generational relationships, becomes the religious marketplace, becomes identity formation.

The end of German-language prayers in America becomes -- curiously -- German-language prayers offered again, every third Sunday or with a special deutschem Quartet

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Old Christian radicals

Art Gish also authored Hebron Journal: Stories of Nonviolent Peacemaking, The New Left and Christian Radicalism, and a number of other books on Christian community, Christian living, and anabaptist radicalism. He died in a farming accident several months after this documentary was made.

Peggy Gish has written on her time as a peace activist in Iraq in Iraq: A Journey of Hope and Peace. She was the first to report U.S. abuses of detainees in Abu Graib, and extensively documented the testimonies of Iraqis detained and abused by U.S. troops. Today she continues her work with the Christian Peacemaker Teams in Iraq and Afghanistan.

The Gishes belonged to the Church of the Brethern.

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The bewildering denseness of an archbishop

There's an insistent denseness to the American Catholic hierarchy that I don't understand. It's baffling.  

How is it that an archbishop can, one moment, be completely cavalier about how the church knowingly put children under the care and supervision of predators, and then, the next moment, earnestly insist on the church's concern for those who were abused?

Charles Chaput, the archbishop of Philadelphia, did exactly this in an interview last week, when he spoke with the National Catholic Reporter after a "tumultuous first year on the job."

Archbishop Charles Chaput

The published interview opens with a question about the Monsignor William Lynn, who was convicted of covering up sex abuse in the Philadelphia archdiocese. Lynn is the first-ever member of the Catholic hierarchy convicted for the cover-up of abuse. He was sentenced for three to six years.

The National Catholic Reporter asked if Lynn got a fair trial.

Chaput responded:

"People will draw their own conclusions. Lawyers in this community who watched the trial, and other objective observers in the courtroom, have raised questions about the fairness of the trial and its outcome.  I do want to say this: I don’t understand the penalty that was imposed on Monsignor Lynn, and it seems wrong."

In a follow-up, Chaput was asked how the monsignor, who was recently denied bail, is doing. The archbishop said:

"I think he’s doing well considering the circumstances. To me, he seemed peaceful. He was able to articulate what he’s going through from the perspective of a person of faith. Of course, he feels that his sentence was not appropriate for what he did, so he’s suffering under that burden. I think it was very important for Monsignor to know that he has the love and spiritual support of his brother priests in the Archdiocese of Philadelphia, and he knows he has the love and support of his family and many friends. By the way, you haven’t asked, but I need to stress this: I also very much want to be available to support victims of sexual abuse by any of our clergy. I’m very aware of their suffering and my responsibility to help them. They should never be overlooked or made to feel ignored."

The deep weirdness and self-contraction and total lack of self-awareness exhibited here completely confounds. How can a man, in the space of a single paragraph, assert that the he and the Catholic Church support and sympathize with someone who protected child predators and also assert that he's "very aware" of the suffering of the abused?

If the archbishop is curious as to why the victims of sexual abuse might have been made to feel ignored, he need look no further than his own statement.

Chaput apparently does not believe cover-up sex abuse is a serious enough offense to merit three to six years in prison, and is not appalled by the idea that the monsignor's "sentence was not appropriate for what he did."

To be clear, "what he did" was essentially guard the door while priests abused children.

Monsignor William J. Lynn

What he did was place men like Father Edward V. Avery,  Father John P. Schmeer, Father David C. Sicolil, Father John H. Mulholland, Father Thomas J. Wisniewski, Father Robert L. Brennan, Father Nicholas V. Cudemo, and many, many others, in the proximity of children, even though he knew there were credible charges they had routinely abused children. What he did was serve his church and his archbishop -- one of Chaput's predecessors -- by consistently covering up for pedophile priests, making concerns about scandal, exposure, and legal liability a priority over everything else.

The question for Chaput is, what don't you understand?

Lynn's defense, according to the New York Times, was that he was following the orders of his superiors.

Which is true.

And which is apparently not a principle Chaput is interested in repudiating.

As explained by Richard Sipe, a sociologist and psychotherapist who has specialized in the mental health problems of Catholic priests and professionally testified as an expert witness in more than 50 lawsuits against the church, for the church hierarchy:

"The only virtue is obedience ... You are not beholden to charity or truth or anything else. Everything can be sacrificed to obedience."

Perhaps it's not surprising that the archbishop of Philadelphia would take this position. How he manages in his own mind to downplay and even dismiss the seriousness of covering up clerical abuse of children, though, and, at the same time, casually claim himself to be "very much" "available to support victims of sexual abuse by any of our clergy" -- it just bewilders and boggles.

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What good does religion do in politics?

"Current distrust of the role of religion in politics, is focused upon the divisive force of hot button issues, such as abortion, gay and lesbian rights, school prayer, 'family values,' the putative 'secularization' of American society, the role of the religious right in electoral politics, all polarized by the intemperate, and emotional, if not vitriolic, language of print, radio, television, and internet commentators, who increase the size and arouse the emotions of their audiences by frequently belittling, ridiculing, and demonizing those with whom they disagree. In this atmosphere, comity, trust, civility, and fellow regard, necessary habits for democratic discourse cannot thrive. Recently, I was browsing in my local bookstore, when two clerks, who knew I taught courses in religion, confronted me with an urgent question:  'What good does religion do in politics?' They clearly were agitated by some issue of the so-called 'culture wars' featured in the news that morning. As I paused, they added 'in 25 words or less.'

"'I don’t need 25,' I replied. 'My answer is Martin Luther King, Jr. and Rosa Parks.' 

"They were surprised and then nodded, 'O.K. but they were exceptions,' as if I'd cheated. They were, of course, right King and Parks were exceptional, but they are exemplary of the values of citizenship which we ought to try to emulate. And both were inspired and motivated by the religious institutions and values of African-American social Christianity."

-- Albert J. Raboteau, a leading scholar of African-American religion and winner of the James W.C. Pennington Award, on the hope of religion in politics.

Read the full speech: "Martin Luther King, Jr. and the Civil Rights Movement: As Precedent for Religion in U.S. Politics."

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The odd non-relation of the economy & religious construction

Despite signs of an economic recovery in other sectors of construction, religious construction has not picked up again. 

The stats from the US Department of Commerce show that the economic recovery -- sluggish though it may be -- isn't notable at all in spending on construction of houses of worship. The rate of decline with this construction spending isn't steep as it has been at some points since the economic crisis, but things are still moving in the downward direction. 

In the Spring, there was no hint of a reversal to the downward trend. Now, with two more month's worth of data, there's still no sign that spending on religious construction in America will do anything other than continue to decrease. The Summer just hasn't seen a significant uptick in construction spending by religious organizations. 

Given that construction typically increases in Summer months, and that religious construction has not increased this Summer, it doesn't seem likely that there religious construction will increase anytime soon. 

In January 2012, religious organizations spent a bit over $4 billion on construction. That dipped to $3.8 billion in April, $3.9 in May, and came in at $3.8 in June and $3.9 in July, according to the Department of Commerce numbers.

This means the market for religious construction is not responding to the economy in the same way the markets for residential and non-residential construction are responding. One can see the recovery in the statistics for private, non-government spending on other sorts of construction. But not with religious construction. 

Perhaps the era of construction of houses of worship is over in America. Certainly it now seems it was an era, rather than just being normalcy. 

It's difficult to imagine the near future will witness construction spending of the volume seen even during the recession. It's seems less likely still to see how these numbers might again reach the heights they did a decade ago, when nearly $9 billion per month was spent on religious construction in the United States.

The most recent numbers continue to support the point I made in July that there doesn't seem to be any clear relationship between economic conditions and religious construction. The decline in religious construction spending doesn't neatly correlate to the economic crisis, and the economic recovery doesn't   appear to have any bearing on religious construction either. 

It's just not clear what material conditions are conducive to religious construction. There's a kind of strange disconnect between the economy and this sector of the construction market. 

Comparisons to other sectors of construction make this clear. The signs of a recovery are apparent when one looks at the data for private spending on residential construction and non-residential construction. With residential construction, there's a bottom to the collapse of the market, and things turn around in mid 2011:

With non-residential construction -- only taking into account that construction funded by private sources, so as not to muddle things with government spending -- the same patter is visible. Spending drops from nearly $420 billion in 2008 to about $220 billion in January 2011. From that point on, spending as trended upwards:

Comparing all three data sets, the relationship between residential and non-residential construction spending is apparent. These look like they're responding to the same economic reality, the same economic conditions. Religious spending, by comparison, seems totally detached from the reality affecting the other sectors of construction:

It's still not at all clear to me why this is so. The economics of religious construction are ambiguous.

There's a temptation, I think, to see the change in idealist rather than materialist terms, but that doesn't particularly work either. One could argue and might want to argue that what's happened to spending on houses of worship in America isn't most basically economic, but theological. One could argue, for example that sometime around 2002, when the decline in spending seems to start, something shifted in the terms religious leaders and people used to conceive of and conceptualize spending, so that perhaps, for example, there was a shift from language about "sowing" and "expectations" and "enlarg[ing] the place of your tent," to language about "stewardship."

There's some evidence to support the idea that this has happened among evangelicals. The tide may have turned against megachurches, or at least the under girding theory of megachurches. 

Famously, for example, Willow Creek, the very influential megachurch that had served as a model for many, announced that their model was flawed and wasn't working as they'd predicted it would. Pastor Bill Hybels announced, pretty bluntly, "We made a mistake."

That's only evangelicals, though. Evangelicals count for roughly a third of Americans, so theological changes in that tradition that directly relate to church's construction spending are not irrelevant, but there's still the other two-thirds to consider. Surely it's not the case that most religious construction is done by just one-third of religious people? The Department of Commerce doesn't break down the religious construction number, but the statistics include Catholic construction, other Protestant construction, and non-Christian construction, too. 

If one posits a theological change as the condition for the change in religious construction spending, one either has to argue that 1) the change in one theological tradition was significant enough to cause the bulk of the affect of decline in religious spending; 2) that the theological change happened across traditions and across religions; or 3) that there were multiple, basically simultaneous theological changes in a variety of religious groups.

Those are difficult arguments to make. None of them seem, on the face of things, plausible. Perhaps with more data, an idealist argument for the root cause of the collapse of religious construction spending would have some support. 

I'm personally still inclined to look for a materialist answer, though I don't know of a decent one right now. It seems to me that it must be the case that, however decisions are made on a micro, case-by-case, congregation-by-congregation level, there must be some marco explanation that shows that certain social conditions relate to and result in increased spending on the construction of houses of worship, and that other social conditions are strongly connected to the decrease of spending seen over the last decade. 

What are those conditions, though? At least for now, there does not seem to be an answer. 

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The very, very basic problem of scientism

"Scientism" is the idea that all real knowledge is scientific knowledge, subject to experiments, empirical verification, and so on. It is "the view that all answerable questions are empirical."

Lawrence Krauss, a theoretical physicist and the author of A Universe from Nothing, recently argued for (and, more, from) this position in The Guardian. He argued that philosophy should be replaced by science, since answers, to count as answers, have to be science's answers. What some might see as science's "imperialism," he said, is actually "merely distinguishing between questions that are answerable and those that aren't. To first approximation, all the answerable ones end up moving into the domain of empirical knowledge, aka science."

The standard challenge for scientism -- dealt with, kind of, in the interview -- is about ethics. How can a statement about what one ought to do be proven empirically? How could an injunction against, say, cannibalism, be verified by observation? What would "verification" in such a case even mean?

Another issue with this idea that all answerable questions are empirical is raised by Mark de Silva at the New York Times' philosophy blog. Math, de Silva says, is generally not considered to be empirical. The answer to the square root of negative one can't be found in experience, but that doesn't mean there's not an answer.

There's an even more fundamental problem with this idea, though.

The claim is nonsense by its own standards of nonsense.

If it's the case that "all answerable questions are empirical," what empirical evidence could be proffered to answer the question of whether all answerable questions are empirical? There's an induction problem here, and also a self-referential coherence problem. What possible scientifically acceptable test could there be to prove that scientific tests offer the only real form of knowledge? What observable fact can be cited to support the claim that questions have answers if and only if such answers are observable facts?

The claim can't logically be grounded in empirical evidence. Which means, it itself isn't grounded in itself at the very moment it claims to arbitrate the only available ground of reason. If it's true that "all answerable questions are empirical," then the question "are all answerable questions empirical?" is not an answerable question.

This is not a novel argument I am making. In the history of philosophy, the above issue is most directly associated with the critique of the logical positivists of the Vienna Circle. I make no claim to originality on this point. It would be helpful, though, if those claiming science has or can or should replace philosophy knew enough philosophy and history of philosophy to at least recognized the very well established problems with their overly simplistic claims for science.

Scientism -- or at least this version of it -- has a problem with morals, and it has a problem with math. It also especially has a very very basic problem of making its own claims meet the standards those claims set for legitimate claims.

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Beneath Round Mountain

In the Swabian Alps for a Saturday.

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The religion of Hobby Lobby

The 28th lawsuit against the Obama Administration's "birth control mandate" was filed this week. This one was filed of behalf the chain of arts-and-crafts stores, Hobby Lobby.

According to Christianity Today, Hobby Lobby is "the first non-Catholic business to file suit."

While the question of what it means, exactly, for a for-profit corporation to "have a religion" is still not clear to me, this case also involves the question of what, specifically, Hobby Lobby's religion is supposed to be. It's not Catholicism, but what is it? The document filed in U.S. District Court in Oklahoma City is fairly vague on this point. It says "evangelical," mentions "Jesus Christ" and "biblical," but does not specify a church, nor any authority the Obama administration could have consulted for case-specific clarification of the religion's position on moral issues relating to insurance coverage and birth control methods.

Moral issues which, judging just by the explanations offered by the Becket Fund for Religious Liberty lawyers, are complicated:

According to the suit, the arts and crafts store's specific religion is not opposed to birth control per se, but only to birth control that is "abortion causing." This means specifically birth control that prevents fertilized eggs from implanting in the uterus. Moreover, the company's religion not only prohibits those who adhere to the religion from themselves using such forms of birth control, but also, "forbid[s] them from participating in, providing access to, paying for, training others to engage in, or otherwise supporting abortion-causing drugs and devices."

The breadth of "otherwise supporting" is obviously problematic. It's the kind of injunction with implications that would have to carefully explicated by a religion's ethicists and theologians.

But who are the authoritative experts of Hobby Lobby's religion?

According to the lawsuit, the unnamed religion defines the prohibition against "otherwise supporting" certain forms of birth control as meaning certain sorts of compensation packages that could potentially be used to fund birth control are not allowed, while other forms of compensation packages that have that same potential are not a problem. Why? It's not clear. The religion apparently requires believing companies (?) not to participate in or provide access to morning after pills or IUDs. The prohibition against "otherwise supporting" does not, however, extend so far as requiring a company not pay the salaries of people who could possibly use the money they've earned to pay for these forms of birth control. But it does require the company to not pay employees with insurance coverage that those employees could possibly use for morning after pills or IUDs.

The case is, as I read it, built on this explication of the requirements of the religion of Hobby Lobby.

Not providing insurance that covers certain birth control methods is defined in the suit as the "practice" of this religion, and thus protected by the "free exercise" clause of the First Amendment. The suit claims that the birth control mandate, by levying a fine on those businesses that fail to provide HHS-approved health insurances, is effectively fining those businesses that adhere to this religion of Hobby Lobby's for the practice of their religion. This is the main claim of the suit: "Having to pay fines for the privilege of practicing one's religion ... is alien to our American traditions of individual liberty, religious tolerance, and limited government. It is also illegal and unconstitutional." This is reiterated by the statement put out by Dan Green, the founder and CEO of Hobby Lobby, when the suit was filed. He said, “By being required to make a choice between sacrificing our faith or paying millions of dollars in fines, we essentially must choose which poison pill to swallow."

At least part of the argument in the case, then, has to be that this really is an exercise of a religion. 

And that argument would seem to require some specificity as to what religion this religion is that has these beliefs.

The closest the suit gets to naming a religion is naming a very broad religious tradition, i.e., "evangelical," and mentioning that the trust that runs Hobby Lobby is run by the Green family, and the family and trust have a statement of faith that has to be signed by trustees:

"By its own terms, the trust exists first and foremost 'to honor God with all that has been entrusted' to the Green family and to 'use the Green family assets to create, support, and leverage the efforts of Christian ministries.' The trustees must sign a Trust Commitment, which among other things requires them to affirm the Green family statement of faith."

This, then, becomes a key question of this suit. First, there's the question of whether a for-profit business can have a religion, in the sense entailed by the First Amendment's protection of religious practices. Second, specifically with this case, Hobby Lobby, Inc. vs. Sebillius, there's the question of whether a "religion," or, more, an "establishment of religion," can for legal purposes be a family's religion, where what the religion is and what it requires and entails are defined by a family.

This second question seems quite tricky: if it is the case that the Green family religion is a religion, fully protected by the First Amendment, is there a limit to what that family could define as its religion's required practice? Could the family in principle disregard any labor law or business regulation or tax requirement they chose on the grounds it violates a practice of the family religion?

If the Green family religion is not a religion, though, and not protected, then who or what authority determines the legitimacy of a religion for the purposes of First Amendment protection? And wouldn't that be problematic if the Constitutional protection is going to extend especially to those minor religions without the cultural capital necessary to accrue recognitions of legitimacy?

It's an important but also peculiar problem raised by this question of the religion of Hobby Lobby. What counts as a religion?  And what the definition of "religion" should be understood when we read that "Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof"?

To me, at least, it doesn't seem clear that there's a worked-out answer to that.

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Ritual, money, & the death of a pet

By some accounts, the function of religion in daily life, and especially of religious ritual, is to lend solemnity to otherwise puny, pallid human moments.

I think of this as the Peter Ivanovich theory of religion, named after a character in Leo Tolstoy's The Death of Ivan Iliyich. Ivanovich, at the start of the story, finds himself at a funeral and "like everyone else on such occasions, entered feeling uncertain what he would have to do. All he knew was that at such times it is always safe to cross oneself."

This is religion as a response to what could be called existential awkwardness. Ritual being what you do when you don't know what to do. The idea is that religion and/or ritual serve to mark, to recognize the seriousness and importance of a moment that would, without that mark, not seem that important at all. There is, in the act, an insistence that something is important and meaningful, despite how it might seem.

This is how I would see pet funerals, the practice of treating deceased pets to the same processes and ceremonies traditionally reserved for humans.



In a mostly horrid bit of journalism, Business Week recently re-discovered the industry of pet funerals, as seems to happen somewhat regularly. Mostly this piece is a baseless trend story, written up as a will-you-believe-this-ridiculousness?, without actually demonstrating much interest in understanding what might explain this "phenomena" or why people, apparently lots of them, want funerals for their cats and dogs and pot-bellied pigs and hamsters.

There's one interesting moment of insight, though. At the very end, Bob Walczyk, the apparently empathy-less owner of Forever Friends in Green Bay, Wisc., notes that services such as his allow people to solemnize their pets' deaths and lives, and to do something, perform some act, that declares the importance relationships with their pets.

Except, for Walczyk, what allows people to mark out meaningfulness in the face of apparent meaningnessless isn't religion, and isn't ritual. But money.

As the reporter writes,

"the most valuable secret he’s learned after years in the business, Walczyk says, is that selling a pet funeral means never offering the lowest price. Customers aren't looking for value; they're looking for quality.  

 "'We're the most expensive place in town,' Walczyk says with a laugh. 'And everybody still comes to us.'"

Maybe one should update Tolstoy: "All he knew was that at such times it is always safe to spend money."

One way to think of this would be as a market essentially functioning to replace religion in modern life. I wonder, though, if it might not be more helpful to broaden the standard understanding of ritual, to think about how consumption can also be ritualistic, and how, whether people are religious or not, there's still this need to mark out aspects and moments of life as different, and rituals still serve this important, Peter Ivanovich-function in people's lives.

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The exorcist in the American imagination

What does an exorcist look like?

A Roman Catholic priest, if you believe the movies.

There are exceptions. The very recent Sam Raimi film Possession makes the unusual move of having the demons and exorcists be Jewish. In The Last Exorcism, from 2010, the exorcist was a white-suit wearing Southern evangelical. There are also demon films like the Keanu Reeves vehicle Constantine and the Denzel Washington vehicle Fallen where the hero isn't a cleric at all.

For the most part, though, exorcist movies depict exorcists as what sociologist Michael W. Cuneo calls "hero priests."

Pretty much the entire list of "best exorcism films" has Catholic exorcists. From The Exorcist and it's sequels and prequels to The Exorcism of Emily Rose, from The Amityville Horror to [Rec]2 and The Rite, the exorcists of the American imagination are Roman priests.

But why?

Max von Sydow, as the priest in The Exorcist.

It's not because there are, as a matter of fact, more Catholic exorcists than Protestant. A recent study of the practices of Christian exorcists surveyed 170 who are active, of which only 2.3 percent were Catholic.

Though the sample of the study may not be representative, it still offers evidence of wide variety of Christian traditions involved in what's sometimes called "deliverance ministry." The study found a wide array of Protestants involved in this activity that, when it's on film, is almost exclusively Catholic. There were various sorts of pentecostals and charismatics, but also evangelicals, and representatives from the Reformed churches, the anabaptist tradition, and even the normally liberal Mainline churches. That's not even taking into consideration the various non-orthodox and non-Christian sorts of exorcists.

As Cuneo writes in American Exorcism, there seems to be an across-the-board media bias in favor of Catholic exorcists. Protestant clergy engaged in spiritual combat with demons just, for some reason, doesn't do it for the American imagination. Speaking of the 1980s, Cuneo writes,

"While evangelicals and cahrismatics were expelling demons by the busload without attracting much more than passing notice, the slightest mention of an officially sanctioned Roman Catholic exorcism was all it took to bring the media scrambling to full attention. By almost universal consensus this was the genuine article, the truly epic struggle between the supernatural good and evil. Everything else was pale imitation."

There doesn't seem to be a clear answer as to why this is so. Four possible answers:

1) Catholic imagery is inherently cinematic. 
The material objects of the Catholic faith and the Catholic liturgy simply film well. Crucifixes and icons of saints and the Virgin Mary, chalices and wafers, collars and stoles: these objects immediately convey certain ideas. A concept of "righteous," "religious," or "holy" can be communicated without dialogue, merely by showing one of these objects in a scene.

Contrast a crucifix with a child in a nightgown and grotesque or creepy make-up, and one has, in a single frame, the entire possession-exorcism story.

By contrast, Protestant exorcists are less likely to use religious paraphernalia. There could, perhaps, be a big floppy Bible, or a bit of oil, but the "tools" of exorcism aren't, for the most part, visual but verbal. Kenneth D. Royal found, in his study, that most Christian exorcists use "the name of Jesus" as their primary tool, which would make sense given that 97.7 percent of them were Protestant. A man dressed in normal clothes, juxtaposed with a demonic-looking child, giving commands "in the name of Jesus," is not as cinematically powerful.

There's a point of comparison that can be made here to zombie movies. Garlic, which doesn't give one a power image on the screen, is much less likely to be significant to a zombie film than, say, sunlight, which involves an essential ingredient of film and lends itself to dramatic images.

One bit of evidence to support this interpretation of the predominance of Catholics among the exorcists of movies: in the one notable exception, The Last Exorcism, where the exorcist is an evangelical, there is prominent use of a crucifix in the trailer.

2) Catholicism appears pre- or anti-modern. 
As much as these movies are about battles between good and evil, they are also about a struggle between the modern and the pre- or anti-modern. The struggle between materialist culture (in both senses of "materialist") and the inherent distrust of materialism internal to that culture. Exorcism films specifically speak to the conflict within American culture between science and it's undergirding assumption that this is "all there is," consumer capitalism and its billboard proclamations of everything being for sale, and the enduring suspicion that there's something missing, something lacking, something, as it were, lurking underneath.

Catholicism, with its connection to the Middle Ages, serve as representative symbols of the anti-materialist position. Contemporary evangelicals, being linked more strongly in the American imagination to very recent history and being apparently much more at home with the logic of markets, and much more comfortable with an anthropology that imagines humans as most essentially consumers, don't mark as strong of a contrast with the contemporary cultural order.

Priests, on film, in the American imagination, are something like living dinosaurs, lumbering along in testament to the continued existence of a former, spiritual age.

Seeming in this way foreign, the Catholic priest may also carry the necessary exoticism for a believable exorcist. As religious studies professor John-Charles Duffy wrote, the

"problem with making a 'true story' movie based on exorcism among charismatic evangelicals is that it would be a movie about charismatic evangelicals. It would be a movie about people like those you see in televangelism. It wouldn't be about sophisticated Northeasterners or Europeans. For that reason, I hypothesize, producers would worry that they couldn't sell the story to audiences: audiences wouldn't be able to ... achieve the suspension of disbelief necessary to immerse themselves enjoyably in the story. The premise would just seem absurd, as televangelism seems absurd."

The contrast offered here is between a phrase uttered in Latin and one uttered in a Texas accent.

The fact that the Jewish exorcists in Raimi's film seem from the trailer to be Ultra-Orthodox Jews would lend support to this idea that exorcists must, to seem right to us, have some air of pre- or anti-modernism to them, to seem to be hold outs from another world against the movie-goers own familiar reality.

3) Catholicism carries an authoritative weight.
A Protestant -- and, particularly, evangelical -- exorcist would appear to be acting without institutional backing. Fundamentally individualistic, the exorcist would seem to be "out there," and essentially alone. He wouldn't have credentials, wouldn't be taken as having undergone extensive training or have inherited thousands of years of secret tradition.

He would have to vouch for his authority on his own authority.

The way many of the exorcist movies not only involve a priest but also make key references to "the Vatican" points to this. The Devil Inside, for example, is set in Rome. The Rite begins with a seminary student traveling to Italy to take a course on exorcism. They are, then, presented as part of a larger, deeper, broader thing, and thus markedly different from the standard paranoiac.

This relates, in a number of ways, to 2). The Catholic exorcist appears as a participant in an alternative way of life, and thus as offering an alternative to contemporary life, and so when he is also attuned of an alternative reality, he's seen as this representative of another lebenswelt, rather than just as himself mentally ill.

But where 2) could also be achieved in other ways -- a mysterious, Illuminati-like order of exorcists, say -- the institutional backing of a Catholic exorcists does other things as well. The institutional nature of the priesthood means that, importantly, in some sense, Catholic clergy have been vetted.

Whether one is a journalist or a movie-goer, this relieves a bit of the burden of credulity.

4) There's a tradition of Catholic exorcists in cinema.
It is possible that there's a very, very simple explanation for the Catholicism of our movie exorcists. Simple lack of creativity shouldn't be discounted as a real possibility, here. In Hollywood, the tradition of exorcist movies goes back to The Exorcist, in which the exorcist happened to be Catholic.

It's also the case that that movie borrowed a visual style from the Gothic horror genre, which extensively made use of Catholic imagery and visual references.

So maybe exorcists were imagined as Catholic because just exorcists had been imagined as Catholic.

But maybe there's a better, clearer answer? It seems that this is a fixed thing in the American imagination, where exorcists are almost always specifically Catholic exorcists. It's clearly not related to the reality of exorcism, or the experience of exorcisms, but to the cinematic and popular imagination. An answer, for that reason, would tell us little about exorcisms per se, but something that could be quite interesting about the relative cultural positions of Catholics and various Protestant groups, and about how Americans commonly imagine "religion," and what how they imagine an alternative, non-materialist reality would look, if it were possible.

Even in films with evangelical exorcists, such as The Last Exorcist, Catholic imagery is prominent. 

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Striking balance

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'We gospel rappin'

Christian rap has topped the itunes' charts this week, with the release of Lecrae's album, Gravity, which opens, fittingly, with Lecrae rapping that he writes "songs for the perishin' and parishoners." Gravity was ranked as most-downloaded hip-hop/rap album, and the most-downloaded overall. Sales were expected to reach 60,000 units the first week, "easily a first for a Christian rapper" according to Time.

Lecrae raps on the album about such sales numbers and his own outsized talent -- as per usual, for the genre -- but then calling all that a "power trip," detracting from the fact this is all controlled by God:

And now with every sale I'm feeling my head swell
Well I'm a genius in my dreams
Even if I was, it was stitched inside my genes
I'm self-inflated, self infatuated
And somehow I convinced myself I finally made it
The truth is I was made like the mob
Geppetto put my together -- my strings lead to God

This marks an interesting moment for the relationship between Christians and rap. In an interview with the Christian Post, Lecrae said he sees conservative Christians being more open to rap simply because time has passed and the world has changed. He said, "Hip-hop … is over 40 years old and so when you have a change in power, when you have pastors who are 40, they've grown up knowing about hip-hop so it's not as strange to them, whereas if you have a 55-60-year-old person, they've grown-up and hip-hop was never a part of their life."

There's certainly a truth to that.

It also doesn't hurt that Lecrae has been associated with the Reformed Christian community, which is known for being robustly theological, insisting on the importance of orthodoxy and taking seriously even seemingly arcane details of doctrine. This means Lecrae comes to the Christian culture with an orthodox imprimatur.

Endorsement by John Piper can do a lot for one's Christian bona fides.

It's also a very interesting moment in the relationship between Christian cultural products and the secular market. It is difficult to imagine this success for a Christian rapper in sales through Christian bookstores. Lecrae's music still isn't played on most Christian radio stations. But then, it's also difficult to imagine this success coming through sales at secular record shops, where Lecrae's music would likely be segregated into a sub-section of "Christian music," or even a sub-sub or sub-sub-sub section or "Christian-urban" music.

Understanding the changes in cultural gatekeepers is essential to understanding this success.

Changes especially in the shape of the markets for music have lead to this moment, where the title song of the most downloaded album in America is Lecrae rapping,

And everything you hold in your hands you'll never keep
So why hold on?
I flow on to go on, before long I float on
Eternal life is what I'm thinkin' I'mma bank my hope on
Believe me, easy is irrelevant
The devil wants us burning for the hell of it
Elephants in the room say we can't talk about impending doom
Or we gospel rapping or preaching people out of they shoes
It's cool, I'll be that dude
We glued to our depravity
Until someone frees us from this gravity

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No attainment for you

"Who is said to have no-thought? and who not-born?
If really not-born, there is no no-birth either;
Ask a machine-man and find out if this is not so;
As long as you seek Buddhahood, specifically exercising yourself for it, there is no attainment for you."

--Yoka Daishi's "Realization-Way-Song"

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Charlemagne

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Exorcists in America

How many Christian exorcists are there in America?

A new study, which bills itself as "the first of its kind to empirically investigate the practice of Christian exorcism in North America," identified 316 exorcists in the U.S.

Of those, 170 filled out a questionnaire for the psychometrics study, 140 were willing to be interviewed, and 15, randomly chosen, were interviewed.

The study is really interesting, and as far as I know the first of its kind. The findings are difficult to evaluate, though, if one doesn't know if the subjects of the study are representative of the field of exorcists as a whole. And it's difficult to know if the 170 studied in the article published by the Journal of Christian Ministry are representative if one doesn't know how many there are total. How the question of representativeness is answered dramatically changes the claim this study can legitimately make for its findings. The stronger possible claim -- i.e., that this is "how Christian exorcism is practiced in America today" -- depends on this sample of 170 being representative. A weaker version -- e.g., this is how some Christian exorcists practice exorcism -- would still be really interesting, though obviously much more circumspect.

So how many exorcists are there? What do we know about the number?

There are at least 316. This seems like a fair start.

In the study, Kenneth D. Royal reports that he found these 316 through the method of "snowballing," which means identifying someone involved in exorcisms, and then asking them if they know anyone else similarly suited to the study, then asking those people who they know, and so on. This means that the exorcists Royal found are networked, possibly in two or three or four groupings. Whether this is only because of how he did the study or actually represents the way Christian exorcists in America are at the moment is hard to say. It would be good to know if he simply stopped at 316, taking that as a large enough sample, or if at that point people were only giving him names he already had, and there was some sense that this was more or less all the Christian exorcists in America. Even if it is the case he exhausted his networks, it could still be that there are other networks out there, which just don't happen to have connections to the groupings Royal discovered.

There is a bit of variety, though, in the denominations these exorcists belong to, which would lend support to the idea that Christian exorcists aren't isolated, but are generally known to other exorcists. The exorcists he spoke to apparently aren't connected only strictly to other exorcists in their respective denominations. Exorcism looks like a very ecumenical enterprise. Twenty different denominations were represented in the study, including some I wouldn't have expected, such as Mennonite and Lutheran.

That denominational variety gives us an angle on the question of the total number, too.

Royal found four Catholic exorcists, for example. They account for 2.3 percent of his 170 respondents. The Catholic Church in the U.S., however, has been reported to have between 30 and 40 official exorcist-priests in operation right now. It seems unlikely, if Royal found four of 30, that he found all the exorcists in American Christianity with his snowball-style search, and that the total number is somewhere around 300. It is possible, though, that the percentage of Catholic exorcists he found is more or less right, and Catholics account for 2.3 percent of the exorcists in the U.S. If that's assumed, the picture that emerges is of a much larger field.

If there are, say, 30 Catholic exorcists, and 30 Catholic exorcists amounts to 2.3 percent of the total number of exorcists -- which would mean Royal's study is representative -- that would mean there are roughly 1,300 exorcists in America.

Is it possible that there are 1,300 Christian exorcists at work in America?

That would be one exorcist for every approximately 240,000 Americans. So: 11 for a city the size of Chicago; 34 for New York City; two each for Indianapolis, Ind.; San Jose, Calif.; and Jacksonville, Fla. It seems strange but not unthinkable that there are two Christians in Jacksonville who have ministries casting out demons. There could be 34 in New York City. It seems like a lot, but not so many as to be dismissed out of hand.

There's at least anecdotal evidence that there's enough demand for, say, two exorcists in Indianapolis. Fr. Vincent Lambert is the designated exorcist for that diocese of the Catholic Church, and he has said he has consulted with hundreds of people who suspected they were possessed by demons in the few years he's had the job. Lambert has, by his own account, performed less than one rite of exorcism per year. But lots and lots of his time is taken up with counseling, and exorcists are apparently very much in demand even if they don't ultimately do exorcisms. If one priest in Indianapolis is meeting with this many people who want to talk to a religious leader about their possible demons, one could certainly imagine enough work for two exorcists in a city that size.

Michael W. Cuneo, a sociologist of religion, has pointed out that there is lots of demand for exorcists, however many there actually are. He attributes this volume of demand to the many popular media representations of demonic possession since the 1970s. "In a sense," Cuneo wrote in his book American Exorcism, "the real curiosity isn't that exorcism is practiced in contemporary America, but that it isn't practiced more widely."

So perhaps 1,300 active Christian exorcists isn't an unreasonable estimate.

On the other hand, if one takes the Catholics as representative and the study as basically right -- which is just an assumption made of the sake of experiment -- and then extrapolates for the other groups, things seem less plausible.

If there are 1,300 exorcists and Royal's sampling of 170 is accurate, that would lead to the conclusion there are also around 30 Mennonite exorcists, for example. Royal found four Catholic exorcists, and it's known that there are about 30. He also found four Mennonites. If we accept the parity of Mennonite and Catholic exorcists, that would mean there are another 26 or so Mennonite exorcists Royal didn't find in his snowball-produced sample.

Is it really the case, though, that there are an equal number of Catholic and Mennonite exorcists? Mennonites -- both the more conservative and less conservative varieties -- aren't generally known for being involved in these sorts of engagements with the supernatural.

But maybe it's plausible. The Global Anabaptist Mennonite Encyclopedia Online, a project of the Mennonite Historical Society of Canada, reports that at least one man was ordained to do exorcisms in the Indiana-Michigan area in the 1970s, so they do exist. According to the encyclopedia, there is also "a growing body of literature worldwide, from biblical, historical, theological and psychiatric perspectives, [which] has brought this agenda into the forefront of the church's theological reflection and evangelistic-pastoral practice." There are at least some Mennonite theologians who believe Mennonites should be "Continuing Jesus' Ministry of Deliverance," as the subtitle of a collection of essays published in 2006 has it. At Eastern Mennonite Seminary, in Virginia, there has been a least one class on exorcism with 15 students, several years ago, though it doesn't appear to be a regular part of the curriculum.

Mennonites aren't exactly homogeneous, either. There are lots of varieties. The largest denomination has more than 110,000 members, and another 240,000 or so in total. If there are 1,300 exorcists in America and Royal's study is representative, so 2.3 percent of those exorcists are Mennonites, that would only mean there is approximately one Mennonite exorcist for every 12,000 Mennonites.

That's not impossible.

All of this is obviously very speculative, and based on some assumptions that can't be supported beyond just determinations they could be true. But it seems at least possible that Royal's study is right and that it could be the case, as deduced from Royal's study and what's known about Catholic exorcists, that there are about 1,300 Christian exorcists in America.

Similar extrapolations, using the same assumptions, would lead to the conclusion there are 37 or so Presbyterians, 84 Baptists, about 14 Episcopalian and 46 Methodist involved in ministries of exorcism.

On the one hand this seems like a lot. On the other, it is possible to find scholars supporting the credibility of such numbers. While Methodists, for example, don't generally seem like they're that involved in battling demons, one can find Methodist scholars such as J. Gordon Melton, a minister who also works for the Institute for the Study of American Religion, reporting that exorcism is "a big phenomenon." Asked by ABC News, Melton said "There is a lot of exorcism going on." So maybe there are more than 40 Methodist exorcists.

The only real conclusion that can be drawn, here, is that more and better studies are needed.

It may well be the case that there are 1,300 or so Christian exorcists and Royal's 170 are representative, so the study can be taken as legitimately making the stronger claim of being about "how Christian exorcism is practiced in America today." It's safer to be tentative at this point, though. The study certainly shows how some Christians practice exorcism today, which seems like a solid starting place for inquiries into contemporary methods of exorcism, as well as interpretations of those cultural practices.

Hopefully Royal's work will encourage others to attempt to ascertain the range and extent of the practices of exorcism in contemporary American Christianity. The one thing that's really known, here, is how much is not yet known. It's just not clear how many Christian exorcists are out there, though it's clear they are out there and there might be lots and lots of them.

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