Wednesday, 31 October 2012
Monday, 29 October 2012
Has Mitt Romney evolved?
According to the conservative Christian group Family Research Council, Romney has changed positions on five key issues between the Republican primaries and the general election. Contrary to the conventional wisdom that says candidates tack to the center during general elections, and become more moderate to appeal to independents and swing voters, Romney has apparently strengthened his case with social conservatives since winning the Republican party nomination.
Where once he was squishy, apparently, on the issues the FRC cared about, now he's firm. Where once the FRC judged the Mass. governor to be only 50 percent in line with the positions of "values voters," he now has a perfect score.
Of course it's possible it's not Romney who has changed.
As noted by Christianity Today in a piece on Christian voter guides last week, the FRC guide released during the primaries highlighted significant areas of disagreement with Romney: stem cell research, cloning, the estate tax, employee non-discrimination, and "strict constitutionalist" judges. On half the issues held to be important by the conservative group started by evangelical child-rearing guru James Dobson, Romney was represented as being on the wrong side.
That voting guide showed him to be a less desirable candidate than Michele Bachmann, Rick Santorum, or Rick Perry. Newt Gingrich and Ron Paul didn't have perfect scores -- both differing from the FRC on the question of a federal ban on human cloning -- but they still were more in line with the group's position than Romney.
Correction: than Romney was.
According to the FRC voting guide being distributed right now as church bulletin inserts, Romney has changed his position on all five of these issues, and is now in complete agreement with the conservative Christian positions on everything that's politically important.
In at least one case, though, Romney has managed this remarkable transformation without actually changing his position. The FRC footnotes their sources for the statements about candidates' positions, and though the earlier guide and the later guide represent Romney as having different positions on stem cell research, the sources cited say the same thing in both cases. He's for stem cell research, but opposed to embryos created specifically for such studies, and opposed to federal funding of these studies.
As Romney himself explained the position in 2007, "There are different levels of stem cell research."
That nuanced position was presented by the FRC as having a "mixed" record on the issue. It is now being presented as opposing the federal funding of stem cell research, which is true, but has actually always been Romney's position. His statements on the issue, cited by the FRC, are consistent from 2005 to today. It's the FRC's representation of that position has changed.
So perhaps it's the Family Research Council that has evolved?
In another case, the records cited by the FRC show Romney has in fact changed his position, but that change happened long before either voting guide was published. Romney's current position on federal protection of gays and lesbians against employer discrimination has been represented in two diametrically opposite ways.
It's true that in 1994 Romney pledged his support for EDNA, the "Employment Non-Discrimination Act" that the FRC calls "SPECIAL EMPLOYMENT RIGHTS BASED ON SEXUAL BEHAVIOR." Romney instituted a non-discrimination policy that included sexual orientation as one of the protected classes when he was organizing the hosting of the 2002 Olympics. In 2007, though, Romney announced that he'd adjusted his position, and now felt that protecting people from discrimination was the states' job, not the federal government's. He told Tim Russert, "I think it makes sense at the state level for states to put in provision of this .... I would not support at the federal level, and I changed in that regard because I think that policy makes more sense to be evaluated or to be implemented at the state level."
During the primaries, that 2007 position was characterized by the FRC as support for the Employment Non-Discrimination Act." That same position is now characterized by the FRC as opposition.
The word for this is duplicitous.
Much has been made of Romney's inconsistencies and how his only guiding principle seems to be his own desire for power. Especially when it comes to the social issues that concern conservative Christians. That, it turns out, may not be a problem for those who claim to represent these Christians, but rather a key a point of commonality.
The FRC voting guides show that Romney has strengthened his position with at least some conservative Christian groups -- but only because they too are more committed to political victories than anything else.
According to the conservative Christian group Family Research Council, Romney has changed positions on five key issues between the Republican primaries and the general election. Contrary to the conventional wisdom that says candidates tack to the center during general elections, and become more moderate to appeal to independents and swing voters, Romney has apparently strengthened his case with social conservatives since winning the Republican party nomination.
Where once he was squishy, apparently, on the issues the FRC cared about, now he's firm. Where once the FRC judged the Mass. governor to be only 50 percent in line with the positions of "values voters," he now has a perfect score.
Of course it's possible it's not Romney who has changed.
As noted by Christianity Today in a piece on Christian voter guides last week, the FRC guide released during the primaries highlighted significant areas of disagreement with Romney: stem cell research, cloning, the estate tax, employee non-discrimination, and "strict constitutionalist" judges. On half the issues held to be important by the conservative group started by evangelical child-rearing guru James Dobson, Romney was represented as being on the wrong side.
That voting guide showed him to be a less desirable candidate than Michele Bachmann, Rick Santorum, or Rick Perry. Newt Gingrich and Ron Paul didn't have perfect scores -- both differing from the FRC on the question of a federal ban on human cloning -- but they still were more in line with the group's position than Romney.
Correction: than Romney was.
According to the FRC voting guide being distributed right now as church bulletin inserts, Romney has changed his position on all five of these issues, and is now in complete agreement with the conservative Christian positions on everything that's politically important.
In at least one case, though, Romney has managed this remarkable transformation without actually changing his position. The FRC footnotes their sources for the statements about candidates' positions, and though the earlier guide and the later guide represent Romney as having different positions on stem cell research, the sources cited say the same thing in both cases. He's for stem cell research, but opposed to embryos created specifically for such studies, and opposed to federal funding of these studies.
As Romney himself explained the position in 2007, "There are different levels of stem cell research."
That nuanced position was presented by the FRC as having a "mixed" record on the issue. It is now being presented as opposing the federal funding of stem cell research, which is true, but has actually always been Romney's position. His statements on the issue, cited by the FRC, are consistent from 2005 to today. It's the FRC's representation of that position has changed.
So perhaps it's the Family Research Council that has evolved?
In another case, the records cited by the FRC show Romney has in fact changed his position, but that change happened long before either voting guide was published. Romney's current position on federal protection of gays and lesbians against employer discrimination has been represented in two diametrically opposite ways.
It's true that in 1994 Romney pledged his support for EDNA, the "Employment Non-Discrimination Act" that the FRC calls "SPECIAL EMPLOYMENT RIGHTS BASED ON SEXUAL BEHAVIOR." Romney instituted a non-discrimination policy that included sexual orientation as one of the protected classes when he was organizing the hosting of the 2002 Olympics. In 2007, though, Romney announced that he'd adjusted his position, and now felt that protecting people from discrimination was the states' job, not the federal government's. He told Tim Russert, "I think it makes sense at the state level for states to put in provision of this .... I would not support at the federal level, and I changed in that regard because I think that policy makes more sense to be evaluated or to be implemented at the state level."
During the primaries, that 2007 position was characterized by the FRC as support for the Employment Non-Discrimination Act." That same position is now characterized by the FRC as opposition.
The word for this is duplicitous.
Much has been made of Romney's inconsistencies and how his only guiding principle seems to be his own desire for power. Especially when it comes to the social issues that concern conservative Christians. That, it turns out, may not be a problem for those who claim to represent these Christians, but rather a key a point of commonality.
The FRC voting guides show that Romney has strengthened his position with at least some conservative Christian groups -- but only because they too are more committed to political victories than anything else.
Friday, 26 October 2012
Wednesday, 24 October 2012
Lu Lobello, a former Marine who was involved in the killing of three civilians in the early days of the war in Iraq, approached the family, now American immigrants, asking for forgiveness.
The family is Jehovah's Witness.
As recalled by the journalist who reported the story, that made a difference:
The family is Jehovah's Witness.
As recalled by the journalist who reported the story, that made a difference:
"She spoke and she said, 'We want to help him.' [...]
"One of the oddities in the story, and there are so many, and I'm really -- I'm not sure what it means -- but they're Christian, for one thing, which makes them a minority in Iraq. Something like two percent of the population or probably a lot less now because so many have left. And they're Jehovah's Witnesses, and they're very religious, and I get -- certainly as anyone would be after something like this, but, it was just, every time I asked them about forgiving Lu or what had happened or how they feel about it or why are they not bitter, because they're not, they kind of of -- they would just default immediately to the Bible or they would start talking about religion and God and forgiveness.
"It was really amazing.
"I mean, you could just see the power of religion at a really really micro level. I mean, they, you know, believe deeply in their religion. And they said, she said, over and over again, we have to forgive him, you know, this is what God commands us to forgive. He's forgiven us and we have to forgive. We must.
"And there was no doubt in their mind about that."
Tuesday, 23 October 2012
A new study suggests that the Affordable Care Act, i.e., "Obamacare," may be "the single most effective piece of 'pro-life' legislation in the past forty years," reducing abortions by up to 78 percent (!). The study tested the effects of Obamacare by covering the costs of birth control -- particularly more expensive but more effective methods -- for poor and currently uninsured or under-insured women.
The results:
The study -- done by Jeffrey F. Peipert, Tessa Madden, Jenifer E. Allsworth and Gina M. Secura at the Washington University School of Medicine -- concludes that this is a "a clinically and statistically significant reduction in abortion rates," supporting the idea that "Unintended pregnancies may be reduced by providing no-cost contraception and promoting the most effective contraceptive methods."
Providing "no-cost contraception" is exactly what Obamacare would do, if not gutted or repealed by Republicans.
The results:
"Between 2008 and 2010, abortion rates in CHOICE [study] participants ranged from 4.4 to 7.5 per 1,000 after adjusting for age and race. These rates are considerably less than the rates in St. Louis City and County for the same years and far below the national rate of 19.6 per 1,000. Using these data, we then estimated the difference in abortion rates and number of abortions prevented each year if CHOICE were available to the entire population of the region. Based on the number needed to treat, one abortion could be prevented for every 79–137 women and teenagers provided the CHOICE intervention.In the first year of the study, providing birth control for more than 9,000 women prevented an estimated 3,000 pregnancies that would have likely resulted in abortions. In comparison to women from the surrounding area in the same socio-economic bracket, the number of abortions in subsequent years was reduced by nearly 2,000 per year.
".... changes in contraceptive policy simulating the Contraceptive CHOICE Project would prevent as many as 62–78% of abortions performed annually in the United States."
The study -- done by Jeffrey F. Peipert, Tessa Madden, Jenifer E. Allsworth and Gina M. Secura at the Washington University School of Medicine -- concludes that this is a "a clinically and statistically significant reduction in abortion rates," supporting the idea that "Unintended pregnancies may be reduced by providing no-cost contraception and promoting the most effective contraceptive methods."
Providing "no-cost contraception" is exactly what Obamacare would do, if not gutted or repealed by Republicans.
Monday, 22 October 2012
September 1, 1970 saw a moment critical to the history of religion in American politics. A moment that doesn't fit the standard narrative of what religion-in-politics in American means, yet was, nevertheless, an example of one of the important ways faith has spoken in the public square, but is dismissed as being somehow not real, not counting as really religious.
On that day in the US Senate an amendment came up for a vote that would have ended the Vietnam war. It was drafted by two Christian men, two men whose liberal politics were informed by their Christianity: Mark Hatfield and George McGovern.
The Hatifled-McGovern amendment was known as the "amendment to end the war." It linked military funding to a deadline for troop withdraw from Vietnam. It was the strongest opposition to the Nixon administration and the never-ending military conflict at the time, and McGovern made it stronger by giving a speech that could rightly seen as in the tradition of Old Testament prophets. Right before voting started, McGovern said:
McGovern's religious commitments are not particularly a part of the public character, "McGovern."
He, after all, was famously tarred as the candidate for draft-dodger's amnesty, abortions, and acid.
His name, after all, has become a synonym for loony liberalism, and everyone knows that that's the Godless wing of American politics.
A closer look, though, shows that the life and politics of George McGovern, who died yesterday at the age of 90, was deeply informed and rooted in his Christianity.
McGovern, as every obit has now noted, was the son of a Wesleyan Methodist minister.
In the last book he wrote before his death, he recalls Summer tent meetings on the banks of South Dakota's "Jim River," where he would watch altar calls and conversions from the back of the tabernacle. He himself didn't go forward, as he represents it in the book, but was impressed by their earnestness and their commitment, an earnestness and commitment he attempted to imitate in his own love for God.
As he told a Methodist audience late in life:
McGovern's early successes in politics came, as South Dakota State University political scientist Gary Aguiar has argued, from "conceptualizing his constituents as peaceful Christian agriculturalists," and staking out positions that reflected that ideology. His later successes came from advocating policies that reflected the "gospel imperative" to care for the poor.
This is perhaps most directly seen in McGovern's work as director of the Food of Peace program and the World Food Programme, to feed the poor around the world, and his work as a Senator to establish school lunch programs, food stamps, and The Special Supplemental Nutrition Program for Women, Infants and Children (WIC).
As Methodist minister Donald E. Messner writes, McGovern believed that feeding the hungry was an essential expression of the Christian faith. It was "a Gospel imperative as well as integral to a civilized society." Messner says, "McGovern’s deepest personal and political passions were to end war and eliminate hunger. He often acknowledged that he did not see much hope in eliminating humanity’s sinful proclivity for using violence but that he did believe that hunger could be ended in his lifetime."
McGovern wasn't alone in this understanding of the gospel. When he met Pope John XXIII, the pontiff reportedly grasped his hand and told him, "Mr. McGovern, when you go to meet your maker and he asks, 'Did you feed the hungry?' You can say, 'I did.'"
Nor was it the case that McGovern's faith was entirely political. He was a member of a United Methodist church in South Dakota as an adult and had a deep affection for the "old hymns," which he reportedly sang "with gusto."
None of that has mattered to the public image, though. Another narrative worked better, and was embraced. His concern for peace was re-cast as anti-Americanism, reckless radicalism, and cowardice.
Richard Nixon ordered campaign hacks to say McGovern's plan was going to "cost a billion dollars just to buy enough white flags for America." Robert Novak, a conservative columnist who specialized in smears, popularized the accusation that McGovern and liberals more generally didn't stand for America, but for "amnesty, abortion and acid." Pro-war labor leader George Meany attacked McGovern as "an apologist for the Communist world," the political leader of a rabble representing not good middle class Christians, but "people who looked like Jacks, acted like Jills and had the odors of Johns."
Such were the identity politics of the 1970s. Such was the culture war, though it wasn't called that then. Opposing a war, having a nuanced position on abortion, thinking homosexuals could be decent citizens, that the democratic process should be open to those who hadn't consolidated power and that government should benefit especially those who needed help -- these were successfully reframed as positions no sober citizen and no real Christian could hold.
Ideas that McGovern got from listening Methodists preach the gospel were understood by the electorate as crazy.
As Michael Leheay of the Washington Post reflected, The Nixon "campaign pounced on McGovern's liberalism, turning the word into an albatross for decades to come .... Nixon's campaign portrayed McGovern as a patsy whose stances would open the door to economic decline, national dishonor and communist expansion"
Such, too, is the culture war in our day that McGovern is not remembered as a critical figure in the history of how Christianity has been expressed in American politics. His faith has more or less been erased from the record, and is remembered, if at all, only as a private detail.
There's a sense that his religion, if he was religious at all, wasn't of any import to his public life. There's a sense that he wasn't really religious. Or that if he was religious, his religion, because it advocated a positive role for the state in caring for the poor and critiqued American nationalism, doesn't count as religion. The sense seems to be that when we talk about religion in politics, we're not talking about religion that's religious like that.
It's a strange bias, that gets us here. It has nothing to do with the facts of McGovern's life, and everything to do with the ongoing struggle in American culture over the normative definition of "Christian."
Maybe it is the case that McGovern was the "wrong sort of Christian," or not "really" a Christian, or wrong about what sort of social action the teachings of Jesus entailed. There are serious theological arguments to that effect. It would be a mistake, though, to take those normativized claims of what Christianity is at face value and so dismiss or just miss the way that McGovern and those like him acted as they did because of their commitments to Christianity.
It's not an accident that the two men who started a global school lunch program were both Methodists.
It's not incidental that the two men who took a strong stand against the Vietnam war in September 1970 both belonged to churches that came out of the tradition of the Second Great Awakening.
It's not irrelevant that McGovern sand "the old hymns," and wrote when faced with his daughter's death, he found comfort in the "lovely old song of the faith," "I Need Thee Every Hour."
Religion in contemporary American politics is not just Jerry Falwell and Ronald Reagan fetishism. It's also this liberal Senator recalling the lines of a nineteenth century Baptist hymn, "I need Thee every hour, most gracious Lord / No tender voice like Thine can peace afford." It's also programs that make sure poor infants don't die of malnutrition in a developed nation like America, and excess American produce doesn't rot while poor people don't starve in undeveloped nations around the globe. Whatever else religion-in-politics is in America, it's also this liberal telling the senate "This chamber reeks of blood," and, when chided for that and told his speech offended his colleagues, responding "it was supposed to."
McGovern's politics were informed by his faith. That's also part of this story.
On that day in the US Senate an amendment came up for a vote that would have ended the Vietnam war. It was drafted by two Christian men, two men whose liberal politics were informed by their Christianity: Mark Hatfield and George McGovern.
The Hatifled-McGovern amendment was known as the "amendment to end the war." It linked military funding to a deadline for troop withdraw from Vietnam. It was the strongest opposition to the Nixon administration and the never-ending military conflict at the time, and McGovern made it stronger by giving a speech that could rightly seen as in the tradition of Old Testament prophets. Right before voting started, McGovern said:
"Every senator in this chamber is partly responsible for sending 50,000 young Americans to an early grave. This chamber reeks of blood. Every Senator here is partly responsible for that human wreckage at Walter Reed and Bethesda Naval and all across our land -- young men without legs, or arms, or genitals, or faces or hopes ... if we do not end this damnable war those young men will some day curse us for our pitiful willingness to let the Executive carry the burden that the Constitution places on us. So before we vote, let us ponder the admonition of Edmund Burke, the great parliamentarian of an earlier day: 'A conscientious man would be cautious how he dealt in blood.'"Hatfield's religious commitments have been noted. The late Oregon Senator was called "Saint Mark," and is something of a symbol of the possibility of a religious left. A committed evangelical, Hatfield believed that the pressing moral issues of his day were war, racism, and the unjust distribution of wealth. He believed that evangelicals should rise up to oppose the "Biblical Nationalism" that was being propagated in their name.
McGovern's religious commitments are not particularly a part of the public character, "McGovern."
He, after all, was famously tarred as the candidate for draft-dodger's amnesty, abortions, and acid.
His name, after all, has become a synonym for loony liberalism, and everyone knows that that's the Godless wing of American politics.
A closer look, though, shows that the life and politics of George McGovern, who died yesterday at the age of 90, was deeply informed and rooted in his Christianity.
 |
| McGovern, prairie populist and lifelong Methodist |
In the last book he wrote before his death, he recalls Summer tent meetings on the banks of South Dakota's "Jim River," where he would watch altar calls and conversions from the back of the tabernacle. He himself didn't go forward, as he represents it in the book, but was impressed by their earnestness and their commitment, an earnestness and commitment he attempted to imitate in his own love for God.
As he told a Methodist audience late in life:
"The church gave me certain things that stayed with me .... 'whosoever would save his life shall lose it; whosoever would lose his life for my sake shall find it.' I think that the life well lived is the life spent in service to others. That verse I’ve just quoted suggests it also has to be in service to God. But there’s another verse that says, “if you don’t love your fellow man who you have seen, how can you love God whom you’ve not seen?” So I put the emphasis on public service to others, maybe being a teacher, being a clergyman, being a doctor, being a journalist, being an honest day laborer. Service to others is the key in my opinion to the good life, and that verse says it all."In another context, McGovern notes that it was not for nothing that scripture quotations were sprinkled throughout his political speeches. His "populist and sometimes radical political views" were informed by, inspired by, and based on "the Christian Social Gospel."
McGovern's early successes in politics came, as South Dakota State University political scientist Gary Aguiar has argued, from "conceptualizing his constituents as peaceful Christian agriculturalists," and staking out positions that reflected that ideology. His later successes came from advocating policies that reflected the "gospel imperative" to care for the poor.
This is perhaps most directly seen in McGovern's work as director of the Food of Peace program and the World Food Programme, to feed the poor around the world, and his work as a Senator to establish school lunch programs, food stamps, and The Special Supplemental Nutrition Program for Women, Infants and Children (WIC).
As Methodist minister Donald E. Messner writes, McGovern believed that feeding the hungry was an essential expression of the Christian faith. It was "a Gospel imperative as well as integral to a civilized society." Messner says, "McGovern’s deepest personal and political passions were to end war and eliminate hunger. He often acknowledged that he did not see much hope in eliminating humanity’s sinful proclivity for using violence but that he did believe that hunger could be ended in his lifetime."
McGovern wasn't alone in this understanding of the gospel. When he met Pope John XXIII, the pontiff reportedly grasped his hand and told him, "Mr. McGovern, when you go to meet your maker and he asks, 'Did you feed the hungry?' You can say, 'I did.'"
Nor was it the case that McGovern's faith was entirely political. He was a member of a United Methodist church in South Dakota as an adult and had a deep affection for the "old hymns," which he reportedly sang "with gusto."
None of that has mattered to the public image, though. Another narrative worked better, and was embraced. His concern for peace was re-cast as anti-Americanism, reckless radicalism, and cowardice.
Richard Nixon ordered campaign hacks to say McGovern's plan was going to "cost a billion dollars just to buy enough white flags for America." Robert Novak, a conservative columnist who specialized in smears, popularized the accusation that McGovern and liberals more generally didn't stand for America, but for "amnesty, abortion and acid." Pro-war labor leader George Meany attacked McGovern as "an apologist for the Communist world," the political leader of a rabble representing not good middle class Christians, but "people who looked like Jacks, acted like Jills and had the odors of Johns."
Such were the identity politics of the 1970s. Such was the culture war, though it wasn't called that then. Opposing a war, having a nuanced position on abortion, thinking homosexuals could be decent citizens, that the democratic process should be open to those who hadn't consolidated power and that government should benefit especially those who needed help -- these were successfully reframed as positions no sober citizen and no real Christian could hold.
Ideas that McGovern got from listening Methodists preach the gospel were understood by the electorate as crazy.
As Michael Leheay of the Washington Post reflected, The Nixon "campaign pounced on McGovern's liberalism, turning the word into an albatross for decades to come .... Nixon's campaign portrayed McGovern as a patsy whose stances would open the door to economic decline, national dishonor and communist expansion"
Such, too, is the culture war in our day that McGovern is not remembered as a critical figure in the history of how Christianity has been expressed in American politics. His faith has more or less been erased from the record, and is remembered, if at all, only as a private detail.
There's a sense that his religion, if he was religious at all, wasn't of any import to his public life. There's a sense that he wasn't really religious. Or that if he was religious, his religion, because it advocated a positive role for the state in caring for the poor and critiqued American nationalism, doesn't count as religion. The sense seems to be that when we talk about religion in politics, we're not talking about religion that's religious like that.
It's a strange bias, that gets us here. It has nothing to do with the facts of McGovern's life, and everything to do with the ongoing struggle in American culture over the normative definition of "Christian."
Maybe it is the case that McGovern was the "wrong sort of Christian," or not "really" a Christian, or wrong about what sort of social action the teachings of Jesus entailed. There are serious theological arguments to that effect. It would be a mistake, though, to take those normativized claims of what Christianity is at face value and so dismiss or just miss the way that McGovern and those like him acted as they did because of their commitments to Christianity.
It's not an accident that the two men who started a global school lunch program were both Methodists.
It's not incidental that the two men who took a strong stand against the Vietnam war in September 1970 both belonged to churches that came out of the tradition of the Second Great Awakening.
It's not irrelevant that McGovern sand "the old hymns," and wrote when faced with his daughter's death, he found comfort in the "lovely old song of the faith," "I Need Thee Every Hour."
Religion in contemporary American politics is not just Jerry Falwell and Ronald Reagan fetishism. It's also this liberal Senator recalling the lines of a nineteenth century Baptist hymn, "I need Thee every hour, most gracious Lord / No tender voice like Thine can peace afford." It's also programs that make sure poor infants don't die of malnutrition in a developed nation like America, and excess American produce doesn't rot while poor people don't starve in undeveloped nations around the globe. Whatever else religion-in-politics is in America, it's also this liberal telling the senate "This chamber reeks of blood," and, when chided for that and told his speech offended his colleagues, responding "it was supposed to."
McGovern's politics were informed by his faith. That's also part of this story.
Tuesday, 16 October 2012
More spirit photography at the National Media Museum, which has made many of these photos available online.
Monday, 15 October 2012
"When at the first I took my pen in hand-- John Bunyan, "The Author's Apology for his Book," Pilgrim's Progress
Thus for to write, I did not understand
That I at all should make a little book
In such a mode; nay, I had undertook
To make another; which, when almost done,
Before I was aware, I this begun.
"And thus it was: I, writing on the way
And race of saints, in this our gospel day,
Fell suddenly into an allegory"
Friday, 12 October 2012
Billy Graham has been challenged, many times, on his relationship to power. The famed evangelist has "met with every sitting American president from Harry Truman to President Obama," as the Washington Post puts it, and has, at least on some occasions, been used politically by powerful figures, made into a religious fig leaf for presidents without much faith of their own.
His relationship to Nixon, especially, has been criticized. It was said his presence as Nixon's spiritual adviser served to lend tacit if not explicit approval of the administration. His presence implied his blessing.
Graham has, in recent years, admitted he made some mistakes in this regard. He's said if he could do it again, he'd do it differently. Yet, his argument has always been and continues to be that he would go anywhere, talk to anyone, accept any audience, as long as he could preach the gospel.
He told Christianity Today in 1974:
This context of "no strings attached" might inform how one views yesterday's closed-door meeting between the now 93-year-old Graham and Republican presidential candidate Mitt Romney. Of course there are many reasons Graham might have wanted the 30-minute meeting to be private, allowing only for a few pictures at the end, but one also has to wonder: Did Graham preach the gospel to the Mormon Mitt Romney?
Did Graham ask Romney if he'd been born again, or tell Romeny he needed Jesus in his life, to accept Jesus as his Lord and Savior?
And what did Romney say?
Reporters were given an official statement at the meeting, a statement that said nothing about Jesus or the cross or Graham's position on the Church of Jesus Christ of the Later-day Saints, and whether or not Mormons are, from his Baptist perspective, saved. Rather, as reported by the Washington Post, "Mitt Romney asked the Rev. Billy Graham for his prayers Thursday and the ailing evangelist came through by praying with the Republican presidential candidate and offering his support."
Politically, the point of the meeting was to get Graham's support for Romney and hopefully sway leery religious right voters, assuaging any lingering fears they have about Romney's religion, and his soft and shifting commitment to religious right issues such as abortion. The meeting came, after all, only a day after Romney told the Des Moines (Iowa) Register that his administration would not make banning abortion a priority. If one believers, as many conservative evangelical Christians do, that babies are being slaughtered wholesale across America, and that this is the crucial moral struggle of the age, Romney's inconsistent and lackadaisical stance on the issue is not confidence-inspiring. Getting a public statement of support from a conservative evangelical as respected as Graham, then, could be important.
And Graham gave the benediction the Romney camp was looking for. Campaign staff told the press that Graham said, "I'll do all I can to help you. And you can quote me on that." Graham's organization released a statement in his name after the meeting that said as much. As CNN reported it, the statement read:
Perhaps Graham's meeting and endorsement will work to encourage evangelical support.
I suspect, though, even if it does that, it will also raise this issue: Did Graham present the gospel to Romney?
The religious right has always had very strong utilitarian tendencies in their voting patterns. From the beginning, when they formed as a bloc to support the ambiguously religious Ronald Reagen over Jimmy Carter, the very first self-declared evangelical in the White House, policies have mattered more than a candidate's personal faith. I don't see that changing just because Romney's Mormon. His bigger weakness with this voting bloc is that he hasn't convincingly demonstrated a deep commitment to the things that are important to the religious conservatives. His personal ballast seems to be political expediency. That has little to do directly with whether he's been "born again," in evangelical terminology.
Franklin Graham -- Billy Graham's son and successor -- made this point during the Republican primaries, when he supported Rick Santorum. The younger Graham said he wasn't opposed to Romney, and thought that "He would be a good president if he won the nomination because I think he’s got the strength, business-wise, politics-wise. He’s sharp guy. And he's proven himself."
That comment, though, came in the context of Franklin Graham saying that Romney was not a Christian, but a Mormon. Pressed on whether Mormonism wasn't part of the broader, "Judeo-Christian faith," Franklin Graham said "Most Christians would not recognize Mormons as part of the Christian faith."
The Billy Graham Evangelical Association, for the record, lists Mormonism as a cult.
For the Grahams, as for evangelicals generally, this question of Christianity is the most important question. While it may not be necessary to be a good president that one have accepted Jesus, prayed the prayer, asked for sins to be forgiven, it is the most important thing, eternally. It is the most important thing for an individual. Which is why Billy Graham dedicated so much of his life to exactly that message. As much as the Grahams really do care deeply about these other issues, personal salvation and internal transformation are more important.
So one wonders about those 30 minutes, and those closed doors.
His relationship to Nixon, especially, has been criticized. It was said his presence as Nixon's spiritual adviser served to lend tacit if not explicit approval of the administration. His presence implied his blessing.
Graham has, in recent years, admitted he made some mistakes in this regard. He's said if he could do it again, he'd do it differently. Yet, his argument has always been and continues to be that he would go anywhere, talk to anyone, accept any audience, as long as he could preach the gospel.
He told Christianity Today in 1974:
"I have said for many years that I will go anywhere to preach the Gospel, whether to the Vatican, the Kremlin, or the White House, if there are no strings attached on what I am to say. I have never had to submit the manuscript to the White House or get anybody's approval. I have never informed any President of what I was going to say ahead of time. They all know that when I come to preach, I intend to preach the Gospel."A year ago, he reiterated this, telling the magazine that he was "grateful for the opportunities God gave me to minister to people in high places; people in power have spiritual and personal needs like everyone else, and often they have no one to talk to."
This context of "no strings attached" might inform how one views yesterday's closed-door meeting between the now 93-year-old Graham and Republican presidential candidate Mitt Romney. Of course there are many reasons Graham might have wanted the 30-minute meeting to be private, allowing only for a few pictures at the end, but one also has to wonder: Did Graham preach the gospel to the Mormon Mitt Romney?
Did Graham ask Romney if he'd been born again, or tell Romeny he needed Jesus in his life, to accept Jesus as his Lord and Savior?
And what did Romney say?
 |
| L-R: Romney, Billy Graham, Franklin Graham. |
Reporters were given an official statement at the meeting, a statement that said nothing about Jesus or the cross or Graham's position on the Church of Jesus Christ of the Later-day Saints, and whether or not Mormons are, from his Baptist perspective, saved. Rather, as reported by the Washington Post, "Mitt Romney asked the Rev. Billy Graham for his prayers Thursday and the ailing evangelist came through by praying with the Republican presidential candidate and offering his support."
Politically, the point of the meeting was to get Graham's support for Romney and hopefully sway leery religious right voters, assuaging any lingering fears they have about Romney's religion, and his soft and shifting commitment to religious right issues such as abortion. The meeting came, after all, only a day after Romney told the Des Moines (Iowa) Register that his administration would not make banning abortion a priority. If one believers, as many conservative evangelical Christians do, that babies are being slaughtered wholesale across America, and that this is the crucial moral struggle of the age, Romney's inconsistent and lackadaisical stance on the issue is not confidence-inspiring. Getting a public statement of support from a conservative evangelical as respected as Graham, then, could be important.
And Graham gave the benediction the Romney camp was looking for. Campaign staff told the press that Graham said, "I'll do all I can to help you. And you can quote me on that." Graham's organization released a statement in his name after the meeting that said as much. As CNN reported it, the statement read:
"What impresses me even more than Governor Romney's successful career are his values and strong moral convictions. I appreciate his faithful commitment to his impressive family, particularly his wife Ann of 43 years and his five married sons .... It was a privilege to pray with Governor Romney—for his family and our country. I will turn 94 the day after the upcoming election, and I believe America is at a crossroads. I hope millions of Americans will join me in praying for our nation and to vote for candidates who will support the biblical definition of marriage, protect the sanctity of life and defend our religious freedoms."The politics of the meeting were pretty much the focus of the news reports, along with some things Romney said at the end of the meeting as pictures were being taken about his father's death. The idea is that "The 30-minute meeting between the world-renowned Christian leader and Romney could provide the former governor with a major boost among evangelical Christians skeptical of supporting the first Mormon nominated for president."
Perhaps Graham's meeting and endorsement will work to encourage evangelical support.
I suspect, though, even if it does that, it will also raise this issue: Did Graham present the gospel to Romney?
The religious right has always had very strong utilitarian tendencies in their voting patterns. From the beginning, when they formed as a bloc to support the ambiguously religious Ronald Reagen over Jimmy Carter, the very first self-declared evangelical in the White House, policies have mattered more than a candidate's personal faith. I don't see that changing just because Romney's Mormon. His bigger weakness with this voting bloc is that he hasn't convincingly demonstrated a deep commitment to the things that are important to the religious conservatives. His personal ballast seems to be political expediency. That has little to do directly with whether he's been "born again," in evangelical terminology.
Franklin Graham -- Billy Graham's son and successor -- made this point during the Republican primaries, when he supported Rick Santorum. The younger Graham said he wasn't opposed to Romney, and thought that "He would be a good president if he won the nomination because I think he’s got the strength, business-wise, politics-wise. He’s sharp guy. And he's proven himself."
That comment, though, came in the context of Franklin Graham saying that Romney was not a Christian, but a Mormon. Pressed on whether Mormonism wasn't part of the broader, "Judeo-Christian faith," Franklin Graham said "Most Christians would not recognize Mormons as part of the Christian faith."
The Billy Graham Evangelical Association, for the record, lists Mormonism as a cult.
For the Grahams, as for evangelicals generally, this question of Christianity is the most important question. While it may not be necessary to be a good president that one have accepted Jesus, prayed the prayer, asked for sins to be forgiven, it is the most important thing, eternally. It is the most important thing for an individual. Which is why Billy Graham dedicated so much of his life to exactly that message. As much as the Grahams really do care deeply about these other issues, personal salvation and internal transformation are more important.
So one wonders about those 30 minutes, and those closed doors.
Thursday, 11 October 2012
Ron Hansen is a Christian fiction writer. Except, with him, the sense of "Christian fiction writer" is that he's a Christian who writes fiction and a writer who writes fiction that's informed by and shaped by his faith, not that he belongs to the genres or markets generally referred to by the term.
He has, perhaps to make that exactly that distinction, criticized the genres of Christian fiction with criticisms that are fairly broad, fairly sweeping. Hansen has said he dislikes Christian fiction because it "is often in fact pallid allegory, a form of sermonizing."
In another context, Hansen has expanded that critique, and challenged, even, the Christianness of Christian fiction. In A Stay Against Confusion, he writes:
Or rather, doesn't value: Pallid allegory, sermonizing, formula and over-simplification are the negative terms. On the other side, the positive terms of his specifically Catholic aesthetic measures are more ambiguous. Not that he doesn't or hasn't articulated them, but that they're still pretty vague, even articulated, and it's just not really clear what these values would mean in the context of a novel -- or how they work out in the context of his novels.
In a PBS segment, Hansen talks about how attending mass is part of his writing process and he views his fiction as sacramental, in a certain sense, in that "It's a witness to what God is doing in the world."
Speaking specifically of how one of his better known works, The Assassination of Jesse James by the Coward Robert Ford, is a "witness," in this way, he says, "I wanted to have this sense of, how do you, once you've done that, how do you redeem yourself?" The PBS interviewer notes that there are allusions in the work to the Biblical story of Cain and Able, implying the work is religious at least in that sense, but asks, "Does Bob Ford really find redemption?"
Hansen says, "He doesn't, no."
That's true -- he doesn't. And it's exactly this ambiguity that undercuts the clearly articulated aesthetic of fiction that's Christian that Hansen holds.
The Assassination is a good book, but, as literature, is very open-ended, short through with ambiguities, and often rather uncertain, actually, about the possibility of redemption in human history.
Hansen holds that "Fiction shows you how to live a moral life or how to avoid an immoral life, and religion is trying to do that same thing, but fiction provides you models rather than lessons." In The Assassination, though, who the models are and what they show is not at all clear.
It's not clear, for example, why Ford killed James, what his motivation was.
Ford tells himself and those around him a continually shifting set of self-justifying stories. In one late scene, the aging Ford says he killed James because he had to, because James was going to kill him. Then adds that also there was the reward money, that that was the reason. Then adds that he "thought Jesse James was a Satan and a tyrant who was causing all this misery" and he thought he'd be hailed as a hero for killing James, and that that was why he did, because he wanted to be famous. "I thought they would congratulate me," he says, "and I'd get my name in books. I was only twenty years old then. I couldn't see how it would look to people." The reader, at the end of this, does not really know why Ford killed James, nor does it seem that Ford knows either.
If anything, the text endorses the idea that the human heart is mysterious, most especially to itself.
There's good Catholic doctrine backing up that idea, but it also leaves a lot of unanswered questions about where, exactly, Ford went wrong. It would seem he's to be the example of immorality, of what not to do, but what he does is conflicted and confused. He idolizes James, and that seems to be the error, but then he reverses course and goes after the outlaw like an iconoclast with a hammer. And that seems to be error too. In some parts of the story he is self-aggrandizing. In others, he supplicates and grovels. He uses violence. He eschews violence. He longs for glory. He accepts his lot. He accepts abuse. He resists abuse. He snivels and whines that the universe is just slated against him, and then attempts actually to take control of his life and his fate, and both courses of action, like everything Ford does in this story, take him further and further from redemption.
The character is prone to self-delusions, and the story, told in the third person, never offers the sort of omniscient account of the assassin's real reasons that a reader could latch onto. Even at the moment it seems like the reader is being offered a good explanation, a way clear of Ford's confusion, it's then framed as, most essentially, the way Ford is justifying himself. Hansen writes, for example, that Ford
The same non-conclusion.Which, in the work, is presented as the better interpretation. It's contrasted with the cheap, false stories Americans told themselves about Ford, where
This is not to criticize the ambiguity of the morality and immorality modeled by Ford. It's the character's confusion and self-delusion and subverted realizations and general messed-up-ness that make this book good.
Bob Ford is, here, human.
He's human precisely in the way that those promoting and making claims for literature would want a literary character to be. He is, that is say, human in a way that demonstrates important aspects of what it means to be human, that can show or teach readers "what it's like to be human." He has real psychological depth. It's these literary qualities of the character that make him a really terrible model for morality, though.
Because it's all so ambiguous.
In The Assassination, this is depicted again and again by contrast, as the story Hansen is telling references or repeats other stories of the era about the same situation and subject. The narrative without a clear moral or model for morality contains numerous representations of narratives with unambiguous points. These other stories are always clear. They have morals. They have pointed lessons, and the sermonizing Hansen will criticize as not really Christian in the aesthetic sense he wants to use that word, but also in the sense he'll make use of when wanting to argue for the right way for fiction to be Christian, as a "witness" and "model." Those stories that take James and Ford as models for morality, though, are consistently contrasted to the story Hansen is telling, which is about humans and the confusions of human life, priveledging complexity over the neatness of allegory.
Hansen, one could even argue, takes the authorial position in this work as the antagonist, the opponent of the historical author who heroized Jesse James, John Newman Edwards.
Edwards was an avowed and unreconstructed Confederate who wrote up James as a folk hero, a savior and avenger of Southern whites, a model for moral resistance to the regime that freed slaves, undercut the "birthright" of white privilege, and supported the corporate interests of railroads and the burgeoning of capitalism over and against the agrarian and yeoman ideals of late fuedalism. In Hansen's account, Edwards is willfully blind to the complexities of humans and history, always casting his characters in terms of models and witnesses. Edwards writes, after the assassination, that James' only real transgression was that he "refused to be banished from his birthright, and when he was hunted he turned savagely about and hunted his hunters." Edwards, in Hansen's novel, writes that "such a cry of horror and indignation" at the way James died "is even now thundering over the land that if a single one of the miserable assassins had either manhood, conscience or courage, he would go as another Judas and hang himself."
In all this, Edwards is the prime example of the aesthetic of Christian fiction Hansen opposes, with weak and easy allegories and wrought-up sermons supplanting story. He is, however, also an example of the sort of aesthetic Hansen says he supports: Edwards is very interested in exactly the kind of "show[ing] you how to live a moral life or how to avoid an immoral life" that Hansen, though he affirms this, never really gets around to in The Assassination.
His aesthetic, in practice, in this novel, whether one considers it "Christian" or not, is different from the positive values he articulates to PBS and in essays on how fiction can be sacramental. If his work works as a witness, it's not a very clear one. If characters are supposed models from which to take lessons, Hansen failed.
It's possible, though, to put aside what he says he thinks he likes, and detect a different set of aesthetic values in The Assassination. Hansen values complexity and ambiguity. He prefers his themes oblique. He wants to render the humanness of characters, their confusions and self-contraditions, their intermingled wheat and tares. He represents them as, most essentially, born concupiscent and morally deformed and also bearing within themselves, at the same time, the divine. He values showing humans as creatures mystified by themselves, and the world as a place also thus mystified. History, for him, is best presented as a stage where humans act on their inveterate, incontrovertible belief in personal redemption and beatification -- redemption and beatification they do not easily find.
Hansen will say, if you ask him, that fiction "helps us to know we believe," that it "holds up to the light, fathoms, simplifies, and refines those existential truths that, without such interpretations, seem all too secret, partial, and elusive."
In practice, though, in this book, his aesthetic seems rather to value the partial, the elusive, the truths that are not simple, so easy to turn into sermons. Whether that means his books, his aesthetic values and the fiction he writes, are more or less Christian than the genres that go by the name "Christian fiction" is probably a matter of personal tastes and definitions.
This is the alternative sense of "Christian fiction" one finds, though, in the worked-out aesthetic preferences of the faith Hansen has that shapes and informs his stories.
He has, perhaps to make that exactly that distinction, criticized the genres of Christian fiction with criticisms that are fairly broad, fairly sweeping. Hansen has said he dislikes Christian fiction because it "is often in fact pallid allegory, a form of sermonizing."
In another context, Hansen has expanded that critique, and challenged, even, the Christianness of Christian fiction. In A Stay Against Confusion, he writes:
"So-called Christian fiction is often in fact pallid allegory, or a form of sermonizing, or is a reduction into formula, providing first-century, Pauline solutions to oversimplified problems, sometimes yielding to a Manichean dualism wherein good and evil are plainly at war, or offering as Christianity conservative politics. We cannot call a fiction Christian just because there is no irreligion in it, no skepticism, nothing to cause offense."Whether or not that's a fair critique of Christian fiction, it does get at the sense of the aesthetic expression of Christianity that Hansen values.
Or rather, doesn't value: Pallid allegory, sermonizing, formula and over-simplification are the negative terms. On the other side, the positive terms of his specifically Catholic aesthetic measures are more ambiguous. Not that he doesn't or hasn't articulated them, but that they're still pretty vague, even articulated, and it's just not really clear what these values would mean in the context of a novel -- or how they work out in the context of his novels.
In a PBS segment, Hansen talks about how attending mass is part of his writing process and he views his fiction as sacramental, in a certain sense, in that "It's a witness to what God is doing in the world."
Speaking specifically of how one of his better known works, The Assassination of Jesse James by the Coward Robert Ford, is a "witness," in this way, he says, "I wanted to have this sense of, how do you, once you've done that, how do you redeem yourself?" The PBS interviewer notes that there are allusions in the work to the Biblical story of Cain and Able, implying the work is religious at least in that sense, but asks, "Does Bob Ford really find redemption?"
Hansen says, "He doesn't, no."
That's true -- he doesn't. And it's exactly this ambiguity that undercuts the clearly articulated aesthetic of fiction that's Christian that Hansen holds.
The Assassination is a good book, but, as literature, is very open-ended, short through with ambiguities, and often rather uncertain, actually, about the possibility of redemption in human history.
Hansen holds that "Fiction shows you how to live a moral life or how to avoid an immoral life, and religion is trying to do that same thing, but fiction provides you models rather than lessons." In The Assassination, though, who the models are and what they show is not at all clear.
It's not clear, for example, why Ford killed James, what his motivation was.
Ford tells himself and those around him a continually shifting set of self-justifying stories. In one late scene, the aging Ford says he killed James because he had to, because James was going to kill him. Then adds that also there was the reward money, that that was the reason. Then adds that he "thought Jesse James was a Satan and a tyrant who was causing all this misery" and he thought he'd be hailed as a hero for killing James, and that that was why he did, because he wanted to be famous. "I thought they would congratulate me," he says, "and I'd get my name in books. I was only twenty years old then. I couldn't see how it would look to people." The reader, at the end of this, does not really know why Ford killed James, nor does it seem that Ford knows either.
If anything, the text endorses the idea that the human heart is mysterious, most especially to itself.
There's good Catholic doctrine backing up that idea, but it also leaves a lot of unanswered questions about where, exactly, Ford went wrong. It would seem he's to be the example of immorality, of what not to do, but what he does is conflicted and confused. He idolizes James, and that seems to be the error, but then he reverses course and goes after the outlaw like an iconoclast with a hammer. And that seems to be error too. In some parts of the story he is self-aggrandizing. In others, he supplicates and grovels. He uses violence. He eschews violence. He longs for glory. He accepts his lot. He accepts abuse. He resists abuse. He snivels and whines that the universe is just slated against him, and then attempts actually to take control of his life and his fate, and both courses of action, like everything Ford does in this story, take him further and further from redemption.
The character is prone to self-delusions, and the story, told in the third person, never offers the sort of omniscient account of the assassin's real reasons that a reader could latch onto. Even at the moment it seems like the reader is being offered a good explanation, a way clear of Ford's confusion, it's then framed as, most essentially, the way Ford is justifying himself. Hansen writes, for example, that Ford
"was ashamed of his persiflage, his boasting, his pretensions, his dispassion, his inability to express what he now believed was the case: that he truly regretted killing Jesse, that he missed the man as much as anybody and wished his murder hadn't been necessary."What starts out as Ford's seeming moment of self realization, and possibly a kind of confession and moment of redemption, turns out to be only Ford offering another insufficient account of things. The moment of clarity turns out to be just another set of self-justifying delusions, more of the same shifting, shuffling confusion.
The same non-conclusion.Which, in the work, is presented as the better interpretation. It's contrasted with the cheap, false stories Americans told themselves about Ford, where
"Everything was exaggerated and magnified -- if he was not religious then he was slavishly in league with Satan; if he slept little it was of course the consequence of nightmares; and it was generally agreed upon by all that Bob was plagued by apparitions, by incorporeal voices, by grim imaginings of his own grave and stinging judgement of history -- even the indignant silence that he gradually adopted was guessed to be charged with meaning."The same confusion is at work with the other characters. James is no less conflicted. No less confused a model or more a witness to anything clear.
This is not to criticize the ambiguity of the morality and immorality modeled by Ford. It's the character's confusion and self-delusion and subverted realizations and general messed-up-ness that make this book good.
Bob Ford is, here, human.
He's human precisely in the way that those promoting and making claims for literature would want a literary character to be. He is, that is say, human in a way that demonstrates important aspects of what it means to be human, that can show or teach readers "what it's like to be human." He has real psychological depth. It's these literary qualities of the character that make him a really terrible model for morality, though.
Because it's all so ambiguous.
In The Assassination, this is depicted again and again by contrast, as the story Hansen is telling references or repeats other stories of the era about the same situation and subject. The narrative without a clear moral or model for morality contains numerous representations of narratives with unambiguous points. These other stories are always clear. They have morals. They have pointed lessons, and the sermonizing Hansen will criticize as not really Christian in the aesthetic sense he wants to use that word, but also in the sense he'll make use of when wanting to argue for the right way for fiction to be Christian, as a "witness" and "model." Those stories that take James and Ford as models for morality, though, are consistently contrasted to the story Hansen is telling, which is about humans and the confusions of human life, priveledging complexity over the neatness of allegory.
Hansen, one could even argue, takes the authorial position in this work as the antagonist, the opponent of the historical author who heroized Jesse James, John Newman Edwards.
Edwards was an avowed and unreconstructed Confederate who wrote up James as a folk hero, a savior and avenger of Southern whites, a model for moral resistance to the regime that freed slaves, undercut the "birthright" of white privilege, and supported the corporate interests of railroads and the burgeoning of capitalism over and against the agrarian and yeoman ideals of late fuedalism. In Hansen's account, Edwards is willfully blind to the complexities of humans and history, always casting his characters in terms of models and witnesses. Edwards writes, after the assassination, that James' only real transgression was that he "refused to be banished from his birthright, and when he was hunted he turned savagely about and hunted his hunters." Edwards, in Hansen's novel, writes that "such a cry of horror and indignation" at the way James died "is even now thundering over the land that if a single one of the miserable assassins had either manhood, conscience or courage, he would go as another Judas and hang himself."
In all this, Edwards is the prime example of the aesthetic of Christian fiction Hansen opposes, with weak and easy allegories and wrought-up sermons supplanting story. He is, however, also an example of the sort of aesthetic Hansen says he supports: Edwards is very interested in exactly the kind of "show[ing] you how to live a moral life or how to avoid an immoral life" that Hansen, though he affirms this, never really gets around to in The Assassination.
His aesthetic, in practice, in this novel, whether one considers it "Christian" or not, is different from the positive values he articulates to PBS and in essays on how fiction can be sacramental. If his work works as a witness, it's not a very clear one. If characters are supposed models from which to take lessons, Hansen failed.
It's possible, though, to put aside what he says he thinks he likes, and detect a different set of aesthetic values in The Assassination. Hansen values complexity and ambiguity. He prefers his themes oblique. He wants to render the humanness of characters, their confusions and self-contraditions, their intermingled wheat and tares. He represents them as, most essentially, born concupiscent and morally deformed and also bearing within themselves, at the same time, the divine. He values showing humans as creatures mystified by themselves, and the world as a place also thus mystified. History, for him, is best presented as a stage where humans act on their inveterate, incontrovertible belief in personal redemption and beatification -- redemption and beatification they do not easily find.
Hansen will say, if you ask him, that fiction "helps us to know we believe," that it "holds up to the light, fathoms, simplifies, and refines those existential truths that, without such interpretations, seem all too secret, partial, and elusive."
In practice, though, in this book, his aesthetic seems rather to value the partial, the elusive, the truths that are not simple, so easy to turn into sermons. Whether that means his books, his aesthetic values and the fiction he writes, are more or less Christian than the genres that go by the name "Christian fiction" is probably a matter of personal tastes and definitions.
This is the alternative sense of "Christian fiction" one finds, though, in the worked-out aesthetic preferences of the faith Hansen has that shapes and informs his stories.
"In the daily exercise of our pastoral office, we sometimes have to listen, much to our regret, to voices of persons who, though burning with zeal, are not endowed with too much sense of discretion or measure. In these modern times they can see nothing but prevarication and ruin. They say that our era, in comparison with past eras, is getting worse, and they behave as though they had learned nothing from history, which is, none the less, the teacher of life. They behave as though at the time of former Councils everything was a full triumph for the Christian idea and life and for proper religious liberty.-- Pope John XXIII, Gaudet Mater Ecclesia (Mother Church Rejoices), the opening speech of the Second Vatican Council, which began 50 years ago today.
"We feel we must disagree with those prophets of gloom, who are always forecasting disaster, as though the end of the world were at hand."
 |
| Pope John XXIII opens the Second Vatican Council |
Vatican II documents
Vatican II hymnal
Georgetown University conference: Fifty Years after Vatican II
Pope Benedict XVI remembers the council, fifty years later
Pope Benedict XVI (mis)remembers the council, fifty years later
American Catholics remembering and reflecting on Vatican II
A 1962 editorial in a Catholic magazine on the eve of the council: Can the Council Succeed?
Karl Rahner: Notes Towards a Theological Interpretation of Vatican II
BC Butler: The historical context of Vatican II
Giuseppet Alberigo: A Brief History of Vatican II
The History of Vatican II: The effects
Walter Kasper: The continuing challenges of the hermeneutics of Vatican II
Colleen McDannel: The Spirit of Vatican II
Vatican II is still in dispute
The council as "New-Modernist Rupture"
Supplica, a document signed by 82 scholars calling for a review and reassessment of the council.
Sunday, 7 October 2012
Friday, 5 October 2012
[Repost from Sept. 2011]
It seems like for the most part contemporary music won out. Where there was a struggle, new music won. Choruses and worship bands pretty much predominate evangelical churches, and quite a few mainline churches too. It's not like you can't find traditional Christian church music in an evangelical church, can't find a piano and a hymn book somewhere (or even, on very rare occasions, an organ), but, for the most part, that's not what happens in evangelical churches on Sunday mornings.
The new classics of Christian worship -- the songs that everyone knows -- are "Mighty to Save", "Lord I Lift Your Name on High", and "Shout to the Lord".
What I haven't seen, though, is a good account of why contemporary music won. The sense, at least for those who still sometimes pine for older songs and so still talk about those days of hymns of yore, seems to be that the change was inevitable and inexorable. That it had to happen.
I don't find the Hegelian idea of telologically-determined history satisfying, though, so I'd like to know why contemporary music, which was so controversial for so many, has come to be so broadly accepted.
Some guesses:
- The Scorsese thesis: The generational center of gravity has shifted, and those who came of age after 1960 now have the most power in American Protestant churches. As pastors, elders, board members, congregants, financial supporters, and as worship leaders. As Julie Ingersoll points out in "Contemporary Christian Worship Music" in Religions of the United States in Practice volume II, "Baby boomers were the first Americans to grow up with popular music as a continual backdrop to their lives." In the same way Martin Scorsese makes the soul of his movies pop music, Americans now find their souls moved by contemporary music.
- The church growth thesis: Those who wanted traditional music in churches focused on traditional music, but those who wanted contemporary music talked of it only as a means. The ends were things broadly agreed upon, such as growth. The church growth movement, with seeker sensitive mega churches, used contemporary music and demonstrated the usefulness of contemporary music not for its own sake, but for the sake of growth. As evangelical churches copied the model of Willow Creek, for example, they adopted the music without making arguments for the music itself, focusing instead on getting people into church. By whatever music necessary. Contemporary music "worked," according to the definition of growth, which most in these churches agreed was a good definition.
- The slipperiness of the slope thesis: A lot of the arguments against contemporary music depended on bad things -- horrible things -- resulting from abandoning hymns and traditional worship music styles. There were arguments from the mild, e.g. that Christian beliefs would basically wither in the "shallow ground" of choruses, to the extreme, e.g. that drums were linked to and would lead to Satanism, which depended on a clear connection between contemporary music and bad, bad results. Those arguments just didn't hold up. The doom didn't follow from contemporary music, and the traditionalists often ended up looking silly, and like they were just nostalgic for some imagined past, or, worse, cranky because they were losing control and ownership.
- The industry thesis: No one promotes hymns. There's no industry supporting and promotion and pushing traditional music.
- The compromise thesis: About half of all Protestant churches have "blended styles," according to a 2002 report from Barna. Seventy-three percent have multiple services, and half of those with multiple services have one with traditional music. In evangelical churches, "blended styles" sometimes means one hymn in a service, or a re-mixed hymn such as "Amazing Grace (My Chains are Gone)." Contemporary worship music, in these ways, is able to accommodate some traditionalism, where traditional worship music doesn't adapt and accommodate so easily. Even if a church is split down the middle on worship styles, contemporary music is more likely to appease more people, and that makes it an appealing choice, especially when church leaders are weary of "worship wars."
One place to start would be the question: why this music?
Wednesday, 3 October 2012
[Reposted from Oct. 4, 2012]
St. Francis of Assisi, whose feast day is today, is one of those once-powerful religious figures who've been totally domesticated. His radicalness, his weirdness, his challenge -- it's all smothered in quaint-saint gooeyness.*
The power's still there, of course, in potential, but Francis is made safe for the world (Catholic and Protestant, religious or not). We ensure he, the saint of the garden figurine, only ever works to affirm, always so supportive.
I am not saying, here, that it's other people who do this. I'm saying you do this, unless your first response to Francis is to want to punch him.
I'm saying I definitely do this.
I'm saying there's a covered-up part of St. Francis that we cover up that would make you and me go, what the hell...?
E.g.:
The weirdness and uncomfortableness of saints like Francis can be rescued and resuscitated, same as it can with the Bible, a book you're not really reading if it's not messing you up. It's possible to de-sentimentalize saints so they are challenging and personally controversial, which is to say useful.
To do so would mean, though, that rather than easy adoration, the first response to St. Francis would be to feel appalled, threatened and offended. It would mean wanting to tell St. Francis he's wrong, wanting to disagree, wanting to fight.
I mean, seriously?, he denied the monk a psalter.
*TM.
**Speculum Perfectionis, ed. P.Sabatier (Paris, 1898), 10, 13. Quoted in William James, Varieties of Religious Experience.
St. Francis of Assisi, whose feast day is today, is one of those once-powerful religious figures who've been totally domesticated. His radicalness, his weirdness, his challenge -- it's all smothered in quaint-saint gooeyness.*
The power's still there, of course, in potential, but Francis is made safe for the world (Catholic and Protestant, religious or not). We ensure he, the saint of the garden figurine, only ever works to affirm, always so supportive.
I am not saying, here, that it's other people who do this. I'm saying you do this, unless your first response to Francis is to want to punch him.
I'm saying I definitely do this.
I'm saying there's a covered-up part of St. Francis that we cover up that would make you and me go, what the hell...?
E.g.:
"When a brother novice came to Saint Francis, saying: 'Father, it would be a great consolation to me to own a psalter, but even supposing that our general should concede to me this indulgence, still I should like to have your consent,' Francis put him off .... '[C]are not,' he said, 'for owning books and knowledge, but care rather for works of goodness.' And when some weeks later the novice came again to talk of his craving for the psalter, Francis said: 'After you have got your psalter you will crave a breviary; and after you have got your breviary you will sit in you stall like a grand prelate, and will say to your brother, 'Hand me my breviary.' .... And thenceforward he denied all such requests."**The only response I can summon is, what the ...?
The weirdness and uncomfortableness of saints like Francis can be rescued and resuscitated, same as it can with the Bible, a book you're not really reading if it's not messing you up. It's possible to de-sentimentalize saints so they are challenging and personally controversial, which is to say useful.
To do so would mean, though, that rather than easy adoration, the first response to St. Francis would be to feel appalled, threatened and offended. It would mean wanting to tell St. Francis he's wrong, wanting to disagree, wanting to fight.
I mean, seriously?, he denied the monk a psalter.
*TM.
**Speculum Perfectionis, ed. P.Sabatier (Paris, 1898), 10, 13. Quoted in William James, Varieties of Religious Experience.
Tuesday, 2 October 2012
There was a lot of celebration following the Supreme Court's decision in Hosanna-Tabor v. EEOC. For those who see themselves as defenders of religious liberty, the decision was a victory. A triumph. Religious liberty won, the "current Administration’s audacity" and "an unprecedented aggression" was "repudiated by a unanimous Supreme Court," and the "secularists" were taken to the woodshed.
So why are those who celebrate this victory systematically misrepresenting it?
In a prime example of this misrepresentation, Timothy George and Thomas G. Guarino summarize the case incorrectly at First Things. They write:
The word has resonances, obviously, with a narrative of conservatism as defense of the "way things are," resistance to government overreach and liberals' and secularists' radical attempts to restructure society. Those on the Hosanna-Tabor side of Hosanna-Tabor v. EEOC, are, in this rendering, not just on the side of religious liberty, but also on the side of tradition. The side defending what conservative thinker Russell Kirk would have called custom, convention, continuity -- preservation of these three being the second of Kirk's conservative principle. Defending, that is to say, vis a vis the third Kirk principle, "things established by immemorial usage."
As neatly as this narrative works, though, it doesn't fit the case at hand. The exemption at issue in the case is not traditional. According to the unanimous opinion of the Supreme Court that found in favor of Hosanna-Tabor, this isn't an issue of tradition. The question is rather about the extent of an exemption, and understood, critically, as a question over the definition of "minister."
The question was whether the exemption that does have a legal precedent (in lower courts) should be understood to also include the specific, unusual kind of exemption from discrimination law that was claimed by Hosanna-Tabor, a Lutheran school that fired a teacher and rescinded her "calling" after she got sick.
Chief Justice John Roberts wrote the unanimous decision. That decision says: "Until today, we have not had occasion to consider whether this freedom of a religious organization to select its ministers is implicated by a suit alleging discrimination in employment."
As Roberts understands the issues of the Supreme Court decision, it's not a matter of upholding tradition. It's not -- contra First Things -- a case of rejecting a strange new governmental imposition of rules that ignore the freedom of religious exercise, citing precedent and being done with it. Rather, as Roberts puts it, it was a matter of considering the constitutionality of one kind of use of the exemption that has never been considered before.
Thus: a new thing.
Lyle Dennison, a journalist who has covered the Supreme Court for 54 years, reported that what the court did, in this decision, it did for the first time.
He wrote, "the Supreme Court on Wednesday unanimously gave its blessing -- for the first time -- to a 'ministerial exception' to federal, state, and local laws against virtually all forms of discrimination on the job."
And, "The Court, as it acknowledged Wednesday ... has never recognized an explicit 'ministerial exception' to anti-discrimination laws at any level."
Again, it's not about tradition and upholding tradition. So why represent it that way?
If you read John Roberts' decision, which is easy enough to do, it's clear that there were three arguments in the case, all of which came down to the issue of what should define a "minister" for the ministerial exemptions to equal employment opportunity law.
In the first argument, Roberts writes that,
In the second argument, where Roberts turns specifically to the case of Hosanna-Tabor firing a teacher, the issue is the same. It's the question of definition, not tradition or traditional exemptions. Roberts writes that the teacher in the case was a minister because she was "held ... out as a minister," by the church, "with a role distinct from that of most of its members." He writes that, further, the teacher "held herself out as a minister of the Church." Roberts adds that there was a process she had to go through and additional training she had to undertake to get the title, "minister," and that in that capacity she did serve "important religious functions" for the church.
In the third argument, Roberts responds to those arguing against Hosanna-Tabor. He writes why the EEOC is wrong,and its argument has to be rejected. Critically, he doesn't say they're wrong because they think the government has the right to interfere with religious groups' internal decisions about who will minister. Contrary to those who supposedly celebrate this decision, the decision isn't about state interference, but the definition of minister, according to Roberts. He writes that the EEOC was
Any Supreme Court ruling of course works on several different levels, in different spheres. One is the legal, how the ruling is understood by judges and lawyers in all the federal courts, how it shapes future decisions of the EEOC and lawmakers, etc. Another one, though, is how it's understood culturally.
It seems to me that, culturally, this case is consistently represented as something it's not. The court's decision is being misrepresented by those who like it and celebrate it. Though the decision really only did come down a short time ago, the memory of it seems to have gotten kind of turned around.
The misremembering seems like its in service of a larger narrative. The question is, is it strategic?
So why are those who celebrate this victory systematically misrepresenting it?
In a prime example of this misrepresentation, Timothy George and Thomas G. Guarino summarize the case incorrectly at First Things. They write:
"Not long ago, the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission (EEOC) challenged the 'ministerial exemption' traditionally granted to churches so they may choose their ministers according to their own criteria, unhindered by state interference. The arguments advanced by the executive branch of government, in Hosanna-Tabor v. EEOC, would have significantly reduced those protections. Fortunately, the United States Supreme Court, insisting that religious freedom is the cornerstone of democracy, unanimously supported the traditional exemption."In case you weren't counting, the brief summary used "traditional" twice. Once: the exemption that is "traditionally granted." Twice: the "traditional exemption."
The word has resonances, obviously, with a narrative of conservatism as defense of the "way things are," resistance to government overreach and liberals' and secularists' radical attempts to restructure society. Those on the Hosanna-Tabor side of Hosanna-Tabor v. EEOC, are, in this rendering, not just on the side of religious liberty, but also on the side of tradition. The side defending what conservative thinker Russell Kirk would have called custom, convention, continuity -- preservation of these three being the second of Kirk's conservative principle. Defending, that is to say, vis a vis the third Kirk principle, "things established by immemorial usage."
As neatly as this narrative works, though, it doesn't fit the case at hand. The exemption at issue in the case is not traditional. According to the unanimous opinion of the Supreme Court that found in favor of Hosanna-Tabor, this isn't an issue of tradition. The question is rather about the extent of an exemption, and understood, critically, as a question over the definition of "minister."
The question was whether the exemption that does have a legal precedent (in lower courts) should be understood to also include the specific, unusual kind of exemption from discrimination law that was claimed by Hosanna-Tabor, a Lutheran school that fired a teacher and rescinded her "calling" after she got sick.
Chief Justice John Roberts wrote the unanimous decision. That decision says: "Until today, we have not had occasion to consider whether this freedom of a religious organization to select its ministers is implicated by a suit alleging discrimination in employment."
As Roberts understands the issues of the Supreme Court decision, it's not a matter of upholding tradition. It's not -- contra First Things -- a case of rejecting a strange new governmental imposition of rules that ignore the freedom of religious exercise, citing precedent and being done with it. Rather, as Roberts puts it, it was a matter of considering the constitutionality of one kind of use of the exemption that has never been considered before.
Thus: a new thing.
Lyle Dennison, a journalist who has covered the Supreme Court for 54 years, reported that what the court did, in this decision, it did for the first time.
He wrote, "the Supreme Court on Wednesday unanimously gave its blessing -- for the first time -- to a 'ministerial exception' to federal, state, and local laws against virtually all forms of discrimination on the job."
And, "The Court, as it acknowledged Wednesday ... has never recognized an explicit 'ministerial exception' to anti-discrimination laws at any level."
Again, it's not about tradition and upholding tradition. So why represent it that way?
If you read John Roberts' decision, which is easy enough to do, it's clear that there were three arguments in the case, all of which came down to the issue of what should define a "minister" for the ministerial exemptions to equal employment opportunity law.
In the first argument, Roberts writes that,
"We agree that there is such a ministerial exception. The members of a religious group put their faith in the hands of their ministers. Requiring a church to accept or retain an unwanted minister, or punishing a church for failing to do so, intrudes upon more than a mere employment decision."The fact that the court ruled that there is such an exemption as the the ministerial exemption is important, but the more significant fact to note, here, is how that position eligible for the exemption is being defined. It's being defined by the religious group itself. There's no objective standard, dictionary definition, or legal requirements for a minister. Religious groups decide and define for themselves.
In the second argument, where Roberts turns specifically to the case of Hosanna-Tabor firing a teacher, the issue is the same. It's the question of definition, not tradition or traditional exemptions. Roberts writes that the teacher in the case was a minister because she was "held ... out as a minister," by the church, "with a role distinct from that of most of its members." He writes that, further, the teacher "held herself out as a minister of the Church." Roberts adds that there was a process she had to go through and additional training she had to undertake to get the title, "minister," and that in that capacity she did serve "important religious functions" for the church.
In the third argument, Roberts responds to those arguing against Hosanna-Tabor. He writes why the EEOC is wrong,and its argument has to be rejected. Critically, he doesn't say they're wrong because they think the government has the right to interfere with religious groups' internal decisions about who will minister. Contrary to those who supposedly celebrate this decision, the decision isn't about state interference, but the definition of minister, according to Roberts. He writes that the EEOC was
"contending that any ministerial exception 'should be limited to those employees who perform exclusively religious functions.' We cannot accept that view. Indeed, we are unsure whether any such employees exist. The heads of congregations themselves often have a mix of duties, including secular ones such as helping to manage the congregation's finances, supervising purely secular personnel, and overseeing the upkeep of facilities."In Dennitson's gloss on this, he writes that, essentially, employees are not protected by anti-discrimination laws or employment laws if they work for a religious organization that defines them as ministers. And "the employee could be anyone from the congregational leader, on down to any worker considered to be advancing the religious mission" by the religious organization, according to the religious organization's internal criterion.
Any Supreme Court ruling of course works on several different levels, in different spheres. One is the legal, how the ruling is understood by judges and lawyers in all the federal courts, how it shapes future decisions of the EEOC and lawmakers, etc. Another one, though, is how it's understood culturally.
It seems to me that, culturally, this case is consistently represented as something it's not. The court's decision is being misrepresented by those who like it and celebrate it. Though the decision really only did come down a short time ago, the memory of it seems to have gotten kind of turned around.
The misremembering seems like its in service of a larger narrative. The question is, is it strategic?
Monday, 1 October 2012
"Then Sister Rosmarie told us to go back to our work. Which was a perfectly silly thing to say because when Sister Rosmarie was in your class you paid attention to Sister Rosmarie. Even the kindergartners knew that.
"So, our eyes stayed on Sister Rosmarie as she grabbed the chair, dragged it across the floor to the front of the room, then she stood on the top of the chair with her back to the class. In our classroom, just like in every class room, there was a crucifix. The crucifix had a blond wooden cross with a figure of Christ suspended on it. Then, with her back to the class, Sister Rosmarie teetered on her tippy-toes, firmly grabbed the bottom of the crucifix, and took it off the wall.
"By this point, no one was reading or even pretending to pay attention to anything else. She placed the cross aside, reached up, again on her tip-toes, and replaced the old crucifix with a new one.
"And on this cross was a black Jesus."A story by Sonari Glinton about his church in Chicago in the 1970s.
Anyone interested in this subject would do well to check out the new book by two scholars of American religion, Paul Harvey and Edward J. Blum, The Color of Christ.
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)
