Edith Schaeffer, 1914 - 2013

Edith Schaeffer has died at the age of 98. 

Schaeffer co-founded L'Abri with her husband Francis, and was a monumental figure in late twentieth century American evangelicalism. She taught that homemaking and hospitality were important Christian ministries, and that art and beauty should have a cherished place in contemporary Christian life. According to Schaeffer, God was creative and brought beauty into the world and Christian women, through feminine service to their families, could do the same.

Tim Challies, pastor of a Baptist Church in Toronto, writes a brief history of L'Abri, and Schaeffer's role in that work: 

In 1948 the Independent Board for Presbyterian Foreign Missions sent the Schaeffers to Switzerland as missionaries. In 1955, after identifying significant disagreements with IBPFM and subsequently withdrawing from that organization, they decided to simply open up their home and make it available as a place to demonstrate God’s love and provide a forum for discussing God and the meaning of life. They called it L’Abri after the French word for “shelter.” By the mid-1950’s up to 30 people each week were visiting. 

Edith had an integral role in maintaining the home and mentoring those who visited. She wrote or co-wrote twenty books, including Affliction, a book on suffering, and the autobiographical The Tapestry: the Life and Times of Francis and Edith Schaeffer, each of which received the Gold Medallion Award from the Evangelical Christian Publishers Association (in 1979 and 1982 respectively).

Os Guinness once called Schaeffer "the secret of L'Abri."

World Magazine explains that for Schaeffer, Christianity could be expressed through hospitality, since "hospitality meant a real love for strangers, and having time for them when she didn't have time for them: 'Sit at our dinner table, have a meal with us, sleep in our beds, under our roof.'"

Schaeffer's son, Frank, who has been very critical of his parents, notably in a book titled, Sex, Mom and God, writes that his mother was a paradox, embodying both the best and worst of Christian fundamentalism:

I trust my mother’s hope-filled view of death because of the way Mom lived her life. Mom first introduced me to a non-retributive loving Lord who did not come to “die for us” to “satisfy” an angry God but came as a friend who ended all cycles of retribution and violence. Mom made this introduction to Jesus through her life example.  

Mom was a wonderful paradox: an evangelical conservative fundamentalist who treated people as if she was an all-forgiving progressive liberal of the most tolerant variety. 

Mom’s daily life was a rebuke and contradiction to people who see everything as black and white. Liberals and secularists alike who make smug disparaging declarations about “all those evangelicals” would see their fondest prejudices founder upon the reality of my mother’s compassion, cultural literacy and loving energy.

For a sense of Schaeffer's impact on evangelical women, one only has to look at the many reader reviews of her work on Goodreads and Amazon.com.

Of her book, The Hidden Art of Homemaking, for example:

• I read this book when I was a young wife 26 years ago and it still inspires me today. All of Edith Schaeffer's books have had a huge impact on my life. Expressing beauty everyday where ever you are is one of her ideas that I think about all the time.
• it's light, but inspiring, and makes you feel like cleaning up at home, baking a loaf of bread, and inviting friends over for coffee and conversation.
• My pastor's wife gave this book to me when I graduated from high school, w-a-y back in 1974. I've read quite a few books about homemaking since then, but this one is timeless. It remains, hands-down, the best book on home arts that I've ever read. Filling a home with beauty does not require a lot of money, it requires a lot of love. Edith knows how to stimulate creativity by sharing examples from her own life such as creating makeshift furniture, feeding people, filling a home with music, welcoming guests, incorporating art in the home, caring for a sick family member.
• When I first picked up this book, I wasn't to excited to begin reading... But as soon as I cracked the cover, I was hooked. And not only that, but I found myself being inspired to use my talents to enrich myself and others. Even though I'm not really 'artistic' I was encouraged to use whatever talents I have to their fullest extent and enjoy the process.
• She was my mentor by books.... If your husband brings someone home unexpectedly for dinner and all you can do is dump tuna on a plate in the shape of a can, she has help for you.

At the end of her life, Schaeffer lived with her daughter and son-in-law in a small southern Swiss village called Gryon. 

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John Piper retires

John Piper -- the preacher who formulated "Christian hedonism," and done as much as anyone to promote Calvinism to evangelicals and stoke the revival of interest in Jonathan Edwards in the late 20th, early 21st century -- retires his pastorate tonight.

Justin Taylor describes the scene:

Tucked into the coat pocket of his charcoal suit jacket will be his compact ESV Bible, and in his worn leather briefcase will be a cheap folder, and in the folder will be a 11-page double-spaced typewritten sermon manuscript, with an array of handwritten circles and connecting lines and underlines and exclamation points and notes.  

Within a couple of hours the singing will cease, and he will rise from the front-row pew, place his sermon manuscript on the wooden pulpit, offer an introduction, and then read from Hebrews 13:20-21, the text for his Easter sermon that will double as his farewell sermon.

The farewell sermon will be live-streamed at Desiring God, this evening.

Piper has been the pastor of Bethlehem Baptist since 1980.

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'Cruel, vicious, MONSTER'

A Good Friday-themed sermon outline from Chuck Smith, founder of Calvary Chapel. The text was Matthew 27:35. In the sermon, Smith connects the crucifixion to atheism, calling it an act of atheism, and then says his audience is engaged in the same sort of God-killing when they "refuse to be guided" by God and "reject His advice."

In Smith's telling, there's a marked similarity -- even synonymity -- between those who don't hear God speak to them in their daily lives, those who don't believe in God, and those who crucified Christ on Good Friday.

"AND THEY CRUCIFIED HIM"

I. WHAT KIND OF PERSON WOULD WANT TO CRUCIFY CHRIST?
A. Cruel, vicious, MONSTER.
1. Kill a innocent man.
a. More than innocent. Neg. trait.
b. He was good, kind, loving.
2. Torture of cross.
a. Exult in His suffering.
b. No words of pity.
B. How do you picture the murderers of Christ?
1. Wild-eyed: foaming mouthed idiots.
2. You probably couldn't pick them out of the rogues gallery.
3. They look like your neighbor or maybe even like you.

II. IN CRUCIFYING CHRIST THEY WERE TRYING TO DESTROY GOD.
A. "The fool hath said in his heart, "There is no God."
1. This is an attempt to destroy God.
2. Any man today who says, "I don't believe in God" is trying to destroy God.  a. He could just as well have driven the spikes into the hands.
b. He is capable of crucifying Christ.
B. Some of you would like to destroy God.
1. If you are told God is not pleased with your actions.
a. Instead of repenting and seeking forgiveness.
b. You become sullen, morose, snide.
c. Your shrug of the shoulder and sneer show you capable of crucifying Christ.

III. SOME OF YOU SEEK ALSO TO DESTROY GOD FROM YOUR LIFE.
A. You have killed His voice.
1. You will not listen to Him.
2. You turn a deaf ear or ignore Him.
B. You have killed His influence.
1. You will not be guided.
2. You reject His advice.
3. You will walk in your own way.
4. You refuse to bow your stubborn will.
C. You have fill His love.
1. How many times He has entreated you.
2. Look at the scorn with which you responded to His tenderness.
D. Some of you not only capable, but in a sense guilty of crucifying Christ and are doing the same this very night.

IV. HOW SHOCKING TO LOOK INTO THE PICTURE AND BEHOLD YOUR OWN FACE. A. Realizing guilt what is answer?
1. Acts 2 - "What shall we do, seeing we have crucified the Lord of Glory?"
2. Listen and obey His voice. Yield to His influence. Respond to HIS Love.

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The story behind Ben-Hur

One the most popular, most successful, most enduring Christian novels in American history, it turns out, was inspired by a man who made his career challenging, criticizing and arguing against religion.

At Slate, John Swansburg tells the story:

The train was bound for Indianapolis and the Third National Soldiers Reunion, where thousands of Union Army veterans planned to rally, reminisce, and march in a parade the New York Times would later describe as 'the grandest street display ever seen in the United States.' It was Sept. 19, 1876, more than a decade since the Civil War had ended. [General Lew] Wallace had grayed a bit, but still wore the sweeping imperial moustache he’d had at the Battle of Shiloh. 'Is that you, General Wallace?' the man in the nightgown asked. 'Won’t you come to my room? I want to talk.' 

Robert Ingersoll, also a veteran of Shiloh, was now the nation's most prominent atheist, a renowned orator who toured the country challenging religious orthodoxy and championing a healthy separation of church and state. Wallace recognized him from earlier that summer, when he'd heard Ingersoll, a fellow Republican, make a rousing speech at the party's nominating convention. Wallace accepted his invitation and suggested they take up a subject near to Ingersoll’s heart: the existence of God. Ingersoll talked until the train reached its destination. 'He went over the whole question of the Bible, of the immortality of the soul, of the divinity of God, and of heaven and hell,' Wallace later recalled. 'He vomited forth ideas and arguments like an intellectual volcano.' The arguments had a powerful effect on Wallace. Departing the train, he walked the pre-dawn streets of Indianapolis alone. In the past he had been indifferent to religion, but after his talk with Ingersoll his ignorance struck him as problematic, 'a spot of deeper darkness in the darkness.' He resolved to devote himself to a study of theology, 'if only for the gratification there might be in having convictions of one kind or another.' 

But how to go about such a study? Wallace knew himself well enough to predict that a syllabus of sermons and Biblical commentaries would fail to hold his interest. He devised instead what he called 'an incidental employment,' a task that would compel him to complete a thorough investigation of the eternal questions while entertaining his distractible mind. A few years earlier, he'd published a historical romance about the Spanish conquest of Mexico, to modest success. His idea now was to inquire after the divinity of Christ by writing a novel about him.

It took four years, but in 1880, Wallace finished his incidental employment. He called it Ben-Hur: A Tale of the Christ. It’s one of the great if little known ironies in the history of American literature: Having set out to win another soul to the side of skepticism, Robert Ingersoll instead inspired a Biblical epic that would rival the actual Bible for influence and popularity in Gilded Age America—and a folk story that has been reborn, in one medium or another, in every generation since.

There may be something of a revival of interest in Wallace and his post-bellum Bible epic.

A conference at Rutgers last month featured some serious scholars inquiring into Ben-Hur, including Ed Blum, Brooks Holifield and David Reynolds. I've found surprising little on Ben-Hur, especially when compared to the amount of scholarship that has been done on the best-selling Christian novel immediate preceding Wallace's work, Uncle Tom's Cabin.

I'm interested because Ben-Hur regularly serves as a point of comparison for commentary on the success of Left Behind. At the height of its popularity in 2001, for example, there was one copy of the ninth volume of the Left Behind (the most-sold volume) for every 95.2 Americans. In 1912, when a new printing of Ben-Hur was the largest single printing in American history to that point, there was one copy per 95.3 Americans.

A lot of the comparisons are pretty vague, though, and only make generalizations about how popular Ben-Hur actually was. There's even less information generally given about how it was sold, how it was received, and so on.

Swansburg has done some helpful research, though, and put together key information about the 19th-century best seller:

Ben-Hur wasn't an immediate success. Sales were slow for the first few months as the book absorbed mixed reviews. With its story of a noble prince endeavoring to save his family and restore his good name (winning the heart of a humble but beautiful Jewess in the process), the novel resembled the romances Wallace had loved as a child, which had long since fallen out of critical favor. With its chariot race and sea battle, it shared something with the dime novels then enjoying wide popularity but no literary esteem. Always a lover of the bold stroke, Wallace had written out his final manuscript in purple ink, a color his critics would have found apt for some of the novel’s loftier passages.

Yet what the critics dismissed the reading public soon came to love. Tracking book sales in the 19th century is an inexact science, but the Morsbergers, Wallace's biographers, estimate that Harper Brothers sold a million copies of the novel between 1880 and 1912; in 1913, Sears, Roebuck ordered a million more, at the time the largest book order ever placed. James David Hart's The Popular Book: A History of America’s Literary Taste (1950) cites a study conducted in 1893, which found that only three contemporary novels were held by more than 50 percent of public libraries. Ben-Hur was first among them, present in 83 percent of the collections surveyed. (The other two were Little Lord Fauntleroy and Ramona.) 'If every American didn't read the novel, almost everyone was aware of it,' Hart concludes.

Hopefully there will be more work done on this novel and its place in American history soon.

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Religious arguments in the legal fights over same-sex marriage

Photo by Jamison Weiser (CC)

A man dressed up in Catholic liturgical regalia protests religious teachings against same-sex

marriage in San Francisco, Monday.

One of the biggest, most contentious issues in the ongoing American culture wars goes to the Supreme Court this week, with oral arguments today and tomorrow in two cases about the constitutionality of legally defining marriage as between a man and a woman.

At Religion and Politics, law professor Calvin Massey offers a preview of the cases:

Hollingsworth v. Perry confronts whether California’s 2008 constitutional amendment to ban same-sex marriage violates the U.S. Constitution, specifically its guarantee of equal protection to all persons under the law. Prop 8 drew a lot of attention during the 2008 election; it was bolstered by a host of religious organizations, notably the Roman Catholic Church, the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, and megachurch pastor Rick Warren. It passed by a 52 to 48 percent margin, receiving more than 7 million “yes” votes. Then two same-sex couples filed suit in federal court to invalidate Prop 8. The trial court voided the amendment and a federal appeals court affirmed that decision on equal protection grounds.

In United States v. Windsor, the plaintiff, Edith Windsor, is an 83-year-old widow who is challenging section 3 of DOMA, also on equal protection grounds. When her spouse Thea Spyer died in 2009, Windsor was not allowed the marital deduction for estate taxes, though she and Spyer legally married in 2007. DOMA, enacted in 1996 under the Clinton administration, makes federal marital benefits available only to married couples of the opposite sex. Because of this, Windsor paid some $350,000 in estate taxes before she sought a refund in federal court. The trial court agreed with her, and the federal appeals court affirmed the ruling; the federal government has appealed to the Supreme Court.

Massey notes that because of the way culture-war conflicts have played out over the last 40 years, some proponents of same-sex marriage are actually hoping for a small victory, rather than a big, dramatic win. If the court strikes down all same-sex marriage bans, that could detrimental to the cause, resulting in lots of backlash and generations of cultural entrenchment, where conservatives use the court's ruling as a rallying cry. It's a fear of a Pyrrhic victory. Massey calls this the "specter of Roe v. Wade":

Roe overturned all state laws prohibiting abortion, and even those that severely regulated but did not outlaw abortions. The result, as Justice Ginsburg noted in her Madison Lecture at NYU Law School, delivered 20 years ago this month, was that the trend in the states toward progressive legalization of abortion was truncated by a sweeping judicial fiat. Had the Court confined itself to striking down the Texas law at issue in Roe, without addressing the validity of other states’ laws, there would have been room for further evolution of abortion laws in the states. Instead, Roe closed the door of legislative change and brought about a 40-year battle of high emotions, even violence, and stubborn opposition to Roe and its progeny. 

When people feel that they have lost in an open and democratic debate, they may not like it but will usually accept the popular verdict. But when people feel that their voice has been ignored by a process in which they have no input, they are apt to resist the result as an illegitimate usurpation of democratic institutions

National Public Radio has a piece on a Pentecostal church in El Paso where many people would likely respond to a clear legal victory for same-sex marriage in just this way. That church has -- like a number of conservative Christian groups -- been politically active on what NPR dramatically calls "one of the battlegrounds in the gathering war over gay marriage." It's not a great news story. There are more than a few problematic framing issues typical of accounts of "culture war." But the story does give space to the views of some of those religious people in America who are deeply opposed to same-sex marriage, and worried about what the court might decide in June. One of the main fears is that a sweeping ruling will, by judicial fiat, etc., basically rule religiously informed arguments against same-sex marriage unconstitutional.

This is one of the many legal arguments that religious groups are officially making in these two cases, which can be found in the nearly 100 amici filed with the Supreme Court, where various groups not directly involved in the dispute offer their input in legal briefs.

In Hollingsworth v. Perry, there are at least two dozen such briefs from religious organizations. A survey of some of the arguments those organizations are making in favor of the right of the State of California to legally define "marriage" as only involving opposite-sex couples shows the variety of religious arguments that are being made. Some are familiar, some innovative.

A sampling:

• The National Association of Evangelicals, The Ethics and Religious Liberty Commission of the Southern Baptist Convention, The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, and the Missouri-Synod Lutherans jointly argue the lower court's ruling that overturned the voter-approved definition of marriage was "a misguided incursion into this democratic debate," mis-applying legal precedent, and declaring "in the name of the Constitution that religious understandings are irrational and illegitimate, even when coupled with nonreligious judgements."
• The Conference of Catholic Bishops argues that legally defining marriage as being between a man and a women is "rationally related to legitimate state interests," because of opposite-sex couples potential to procreate and because children are better off when raised with a father and a mother. The bishops write "as a matter of simple biology, the union of one man and one woman is the only union capable of creating new life [and] the People of California could reasonably conclude that a home with a mother and a father is the optimal environment for raising children." They further make the case if religious and moral considerations are involved in enacting such a ban, that doesn't make it constitutionally invalid, since "Many, if not most, of the significant social and political movements in our Nation’s history were based on precisely such considerations. Moreover, the argument to redefine marriage to include the union of persons of the same sex is similarly based on a combination of religious and moral considerations (albeit ones that are, in our view, flawed)."
• The Coalition of African American Pastors USA and others argue that the historic ruling striking down state bans on inter-racial marriage cannot be used to strike down bans on same-sex marriage. They write "the anti-miscegenation statutes in Virginia were at war with the core purposes of marriage -- especially the fostering of responsible procreation and child rearing by biological parents -- because those Virginia statutes prevented children from being raised in the optimal setting: a family headed by married biological parents" (emphases original). According to this group, the present movement to legalize same-sex marriage is analogous to historic efforts to ban inter-racial marriage, since both seek to radically redefine marriage for the sake of "extraneous" social policies. 
• The Foundation for Moral Law makes the argument that "the Framers of the Constitution would be shocked to see their document twisted to protect something they regarded as abhorrent" and that "marriage is not simply an individual right, but rather it is a divinely-established institution that is as old as if not older than civil government."
• Catholics for the Common Good (a lay-led organization from California) argues that legally defining marriage as necessarily involving opposite-sex couples is not discriminatory, but based on reasonable judgements about the biological differences between men and women. The claim is made that "there is a vast body of credible, scientific evidence that supports the California voters’ choice to differentiate the nomenclature to be assigned to male-female pairs (marriage) and single-sex pairs (domestic partnership)." They argue it must be permissible for states "to construct public policies that assume that there is a real difference between men and women; between mothers and fathers; between boys and girls; and between male-female sexual relationships, and those of same-sex couples."
• Family Research Council -- once the political arm of Focus on the Family, though now independent -- offers what they call "alternative grounds" on which same-sex marriage can be rightly, legally banned. One argument the group makes is that "the fundamental right to marry that has been recognized by this Court is limited, by the nature of marriage itself, to opposite-sex couples." Another argument offered is that the state's definition of marriage did not discriminate against anyone, since all men and women, even homosexual men and women, have the right to marry someone of the opposite sex. 
• Patrick Henry College makes the argument that legal definitions of marriage are necessarily about morality, and not allowing the people of a state to ban same-sex marriage means coercing them to morally sanction same-sex marriage. The college writes: "The definition of marriage [...] is a quintessentially moral determination, for it encompasses the question of what marriage ought to be. Since this case (like any case dealing with polygamy or incest) is about the meaning of marriage, rather than access to it on equal terms, each side is asking the state for moral sanction through the designation, 'marriage.'"

There are also a number of religious organizations that have filed amici in favor of striking down California's ban on same sex marriage. One has the backing of 18 different groups, most of which are mainline Protestant or Jewish. These include the Episcopal Church, the United Church of Christ, several Lutheran groups, several Presbyterian groups, the Unitarian Universalist Association, and a Quaker group, as well as the Union of Reform Judaism, the Rabbinical Assembly, the Reconstructionist Rabbinical Association, the United Synagogue of Conservative Judaism, and others. In their brief, these groups emphasize the breadth and diversity of support for same-sex marriage among religious groups, and make an argument from American religious pluralism. They claim that "permitting same-sex couples to marry will not impinge on religious beliefs, practices, or operations, but rather will prevent one set of religious beliefs from being imposed through civil law." Another such brief has been filed by a number of California-based religious organizations who say they oppose legally defining marriage as between a man and a woman because that would be "governmental discrimination turning on whether a committed couple's union accords with liturgical doctrines."

There is a slightly smaller number of legal briefs from religious groups filed in the second case, United States v. Windsor. Some of the groups involved are the same, though there are also others. In these briefs, those arguing for a federal law -- the Defense of Marriage Act (DOMA) -- defining marriage as being between a man and a woman turn their attention to questions of discrimination, and whether or not such a law discriminates against homosexuals. There are also assorted other arguments that are made. A survey of some of the religious organizations' arguments:

• The National Association of Evangelicals, et al., make a technical argument about how "suspect classes" should be determined in questions of violation of Equal Protection, and argue, more generally, that religious groups "have just as much right as anyone else to have our views considered by democratic decision makers. But that cannot properly occur if the great marriage debate is removed from our democratic institutions and decided by the judiciary under a heightened standard of review."
• The Family Research Counsel writes that DOMA "on its face, does not discriminate between heterosexuals and homosexuals, but between opposite-sex married couples and same-sex married couple," and repeats many of the arguments made in Hollingsworth v. Perry.
• The Catholic bishops argue DOMA's definition of marriage is not a problem because it does not deny anyone a "fundamental right," since there is no fundamental right to same-sex marriage. According to the bishops, "civil recognition of same-sex relationships is not deeply rooted in the Nation’s history and tradition—quite the opposite is true. Nor can the treatment of such relationships as marriages be said to be implicit in the concept of ordered liberty, such that neither liberty nor justice would exist if they were sacrificed."
• The Manhattan Declaration, Inc. -- the movement with a manifesto with more than 500,000 signatures of Catholic, evangelical and Orthodox Christians who believe "the male-female nature of marriage to be an essential Christian teaching" -- argues for the universality of the DOMA definition of marriage, and that it has nothing to do with animus towards homosexuals. A religious liberty argument is also made. The group writes:  "Marriage is a foundational institution universally known and accepted, without regard to the accidents of time and place, as a male-female coupling" and "redefining marriage imperils religious liberty and oftentimes requires that freedom of conscience be sacrificed to the newly regnant orthodoxy." Striking down the federal law defining marriage as between a man and a woman would, according to Manhattan Declaration, "constitutionalize" same-sex marriage.
• Robert P. George, who helped found the Manhattan Declaration, Inc., and has been at the forefront of natural law arguments against same-sex marriage, argues that the question for the court to decide is not the definition of marriage, but only "whether citizens and legislators may embody in law the belief in marriage as a conjugal union, as they have historically done." He further argues that it is rational and practical for those citizens and legislators to define marriage as necessarily involving opposite-sex couples (implying it is not just a religious judgement and therefore should be allowed).
• The Chaplain Alliance for Religious Liberty argues similarly, making the case that striking the opposite-sex marriage provision from DOMA would mean that "service members who adhere to traditional religious beliefs on marriage and family will likely be penalized and marginalized, and the chaplaincy’s efforts to protect religious liberty will face severe conflicts."
• Concerned Women for America -- the group Beverly LeHaye founded -- writes that homosexuals should not be a class protected against discrimination because, as a group, they're politically powerful, having "repeatedly demonstrated their ability to influence public policy through democratic means. And their influence is only increasing. Their causes are supported by the mainstream media, popular culture, big labor, and big business." The group also makes the argument that in this case, one of the key questions at stake is who defines marriage, in addition to how marriage is defined. The group argues that the decision should be made democratically, i.e., not by the courts.

There only seem to be two amici from religious groups opposing DOMA's definition of marriage in United States v. Windsor. As in Hollingsworth v. Perry, there's one brief with a large number of socially left-leaning religious groups signed onto it. These groups have chosen a strategy that's quite different than the right-leaning groups 21-guns approach. In that brief, filed by the Episcopal church of the 10 states and the District of Columbia where same-sex marriage has been legalized, six Reform and Conservative Jewish groups, the Unitarian Universalists, the United Church of Christ, and several Lutheran, Presbyterian and Methodist groups, the arguments made in the amicus in the other case are substantially repeated. They repeat the point that there is no one religious position on same-sex marriage and that a particular religious doctrine about marriage should not be given the backing of federal law. 

What import these various arguments will have in the cases before the Supreme Court remains to be seen. What is notable about these arguments from religious groups is how secular they are. They're secular in the sense that they're grounded in this-worldly justifications, arguments which are, in principle, accessible to all. These are arguments about social good, arguments that could mostly be proven or proven false with data. The cases being made mostly do not involve arguments from revelation, or religious authority, or any claims that necessarily entail any theistic ontology.

Steve Bruce has argued the rise of the religious right as a political force is evidence for secularization even in America for exactly this reason. He writes:

Critics of the secularization paradigm sometimes point to the Christian Right as evidence that social differentiation has not marginalized religion. I draw the opposite conclusion from the same data .... Christian Right organizations now present their causes in secular language .... They cannot assert that God dislikes divorce [e.g.]. They have to argue that divorce is socially dysfunctional. 

This is important, because the culture war that's fought around such issues as these Supreme Court cases is often understood -- especially by those involved -- as a pitched battle between secular and religious forces. Religious people and organizations that are politically active on the right regularly express the fear that secularists are attempting to effectively disenfranchise them, push them out of the public sphere. That's certainly the fear expressed by the pastor of the Pentecostal church in El Paso, profiled by NPR. It's an issue raised by many of the religious groups that have filed amici in these legal cases. Court rulings tend to aggravate that feeling of disenfranchisement, which is why some advocates of same-sex marriage (such as Andrew Sullivan) prefer the issue not be settle by the courts. And why some observers think conservatives stand to gain by losing these cases in court.

But, here, the religious forces are secular forces.

The main "religious" arguments being made for the legal definition of marriage as only being between opposite-sex couples is not religious, in any meaningful way. The counter argument being made, likewise, is not that these arguments should be disallowed because they are religious. Ted Olson, for example, the lawyer advocating for homosexuals' right to get married in the Hollingsworth v. Perry case, responds to the religious right's secular arguments with secular counter-arguments, saying that each fails only because it fails to prove what it sets out to prove, which is that it is in the state's interest to bar homosexuals from the legal benefits and protections of the institution of civil marriage.

As NPR reports:

Olson replies that none of the offered justifications for Proposition 8 hold water -- not family, not kids, not the institution of marriage. No one, he says, has come up with any reason why same-sex marriage 'damages heterosexual marriages in any way.' 

Ultimately, he says, it is no justification to say the country has been doing something for hundreds of years, if it flies in the face of the constitutional guarantee of equal protection of the law.

There are many like the Reformed theologian Peter Leithart, who worry that Christian arguments against same-sex marriage are barred from the public debate, and that even if they were allowed, they'd be underwhelming. Religiously informed arguments would be ineffectual and unpersuasive. "It will take," he recently wrote, "nothing short of a cultural revolution for biblical arguments to be heard, much less to become persuasive." This is because, for Leithart, it seems that "the only arguments we have are theological ones, and only people whose imaginations are formed by Scripture will find them cogent."

In these two Supreme Court cases, though, it is apparent that theological arguments aren't the only ones. Whether or not the non-theological arguments are any more cogent and persuasive to the general public is another question.

It's that question that has bubbled up in an intra-religious conservative dispute about the usefulness of the idea of natural law. The ideas of natural law underly many of the arguments religious groups are making in the legal briefs in these two cases: that there is a natural and right order that can be determined by rational thought and ought to be adhered to for the sake of human flourishing.

As Hugo Grotius pointed out, a key aspect of natural law is that it depends on reason alone, and holds "etsi Deus non daretur," even if God is not a given. Which is to say, it is secular.

The natural law arguments against same-sex marriage that are being made and have been made are secular, and thus at least theoretically reasonable and effectual in public debates in a pluralistic society. This is why the theory of natural law was embraced so wholeheartedly by conservative Christian groups seeking to have a political impact on American culture. As Brad Littlejohn explains:

With the ascendancy of the Moral Majority, conservative Christians found themselves catapulted into the public square, and the more sophisticated were conscious that a raw and undiluted biblicism was not going to get them very far in public debates. Finding themselves shoulder-to-shoulder with Catholic co-belligerents in the culture wars, evangelicals glanced over at the popish playbook and thought natural law looked like a pretty promising notion. Accordingly, they took up the idea with gusto.  

But now, scarcely a decade into this revolution [....] finding that natural law arguments are gaining them no traction in the current debate, evangelicals, and indeed many within the whole cobbled-together conservative coalition, were already wavering and considering withdrawal.

The wavering can be explained by the fact that natural law theory was picked up, by and large, because of the promise it would be a powerful tool. Conservative religious people involved in political activism may believe in natural law, but there's a strong instrumentality to that belief. Where strictly religious and theological arguments (built on biblicist or presuppositional epistemologies) had failed, those grounded this way, in reason -- commonly accessible, public reason -- would succeed. That was the promise. And yet they haven't, or at least not enough. The swing in public opinion on the topic of same-sex marriage has been shocking. Arguments about natural order have had little strength, where the testimonies about the public good of gay marriage have been both affective and effective.

The images of long-committed same-sex couples getting married have seemed to growing portions of the public to speak much more clearly about the common good, and much more persuasively about the kind of society that American citizens want to live in.

The natural law arguments against same-sex marriage have been so unpersuasive, it seems that the only way to continue to hold them is by way of giving up on the debate. To quote Littlejohn again, "We seem to be back in a situation where we must simply give up on the rest of 'irrational' society and retreat to our strongholds, or else aggressively assert the superiority of our own reasoning and call upon our opponents to subject their reasons to the yoke of Christ."

These are the religious arguments that have gone to the Supreme Court, though. Perhaps in that context things will be different. Or, perhaps the sun is setting on these particular religio-political arguments.

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The Scopes trial (full film)

via Justin Taylor

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Jerry Jenkins' vanity press

Jerry B. Jenkins is the consummate hack.

The man knows the Christian fiction market and he works it.

I'm not very interested in the moral and aesthetic disapproval that's normally implied by calling a writer a hack. I am quite interested in how book markets work, though, and especially how the Christian fiction market works. So I'm very interested in hacks. Hacks consciously and actively respond to the market as they find it. In some ways, they are just more pure. They're untroubled by fantasies that artistic quality correlates to commercial success, unbothered by the sense of aesthetic justice that insists artistic quality should correlate to commercial success. Hacks write for the world as it actually is.

Hacks write like it's their job.

They know that writing is their job, and they embrace that, and embrace all the marketing analysis and economic acumen necessary to succeed at that job. Jenkins, for example.

"I make no apologies for writing for the masses," he once said. "I am one of them."

He has always had an eye for the markets with mass potential, such as Christian children's series and Christian athlete biographies. He has authored or co-authored 220 books, by my count, or about 3.4 for every year he's been alive. Fourteen of those books have been New York Times bestsellers. He accepted the deal to co-author Left Behind where others would have balked (and did balk), and he wrote the first book of the series in under 24 days. Left Behind sold as many copies as Catcher in the Rye, and it's never been required reading for high schoolers. Jenkins stayed on for 12 more books, plus three prequels, and he cooperated with lots of spin-offs, including a series of 40 children's books. He was pretty consistently smart about how and where to push the franchise -- in one case, at least, smarter even than the people who actually made the marketing decisions.

So, when Jenkins takes up a new project, it's likely that that says something about the way the Christian fiction market is evolving. He's not necessarily innovative, but he's paying attention to the market, and responding to it. When that project, further, is explained specifically as a response to market conditions, it's especially worth noting.

His new project is a vanity press, Christian Writers Guild Publishing. They will be charging would-be authors nearly $10,000 to put their works in print.

Thus speaketh the consummate hack: this is the fiction market now.

His explanation for the vanity press -- which he doesn't call a vanity press -- is that authors now need well-established "platforms" to get published, and that the $9,995 will help aspiring writers get that platform. For the cost, Jenkins' group provides proof-reading, cover design, e-book formatting, an ISBN number, and a package of promotional material, "everything the writer needs for a successful book launch."

The vanity press does not itself sell the book, nor promote it, nor take any financial risk or responsibility for actual marketability, which is pretty much the definition of a vanity press.

Jenkins told Publisher's Weekly that "good, passionate authors are ignored because they're unknown," but that they can "prove their worthiness in the market."

There are a number of self-published authors who have became very successful that are kind of the model being promoted here. They chose an alternative route, built a fan base, "proved their worthiness," and became very successful. One noted recent example is Hugh Howey, who's self-published e-book sic-fi series Wool has become a phenomena. He reportedly has made as much as $40,000 a month while selling his e-books for as little as $1.99 apiece. Another is E.L. James, whose cultural juggernaut, Fifty Shades of Gray, started out as Twilight fan-fiction, available free online, and was then published by a vanity press, and was then picked up by a traditional publisher. In the Christian fiction market, the main example of this route to market success is William Paul Young. The first printing of Young's book, The Shack, was an edition of 15 -- photocopied at Office Depot. About one million copies of the book were sold before the rights were bought by a mainstream publisher.

There's a difference is a difference between self-publishing and a vanity press, but Jenkins' is kind of eliding the distinction. The promotional material for the press positions it as an aid to self-publication. Jenkins' claim is that his company can help aspiring writers follow this path to popular success, mostly by helping them produce a product that isn't as obviously terrible as most self-published fiction is. A decent edit job, a good cover, and a little marketing advice could make all the difference. Or so it seems is Jenkins' proposition.

That's the hope that costs $9,995.

Jenkins, of course, is not the only one who sees that the shrinking book market is accompanied by an expanding market of aspiring authors willing to pay for the chance to see their words in print. The Christian publisher Thomas Nelson -- owned by NewsCorp, FOX New's parent company -- has also recently launched a vanity press. Now, manuscripts rejected by the publisher may be referred to the WestBow division, where would-be authors can pay to have their books printed by the vanity press division of a major publisher. There's also a Catholic vanity press, which promises to provide "proper checks" to "ensure that authors' works are free from doctrinal or moral error," but which appears to charge extra for editing.

Many observers are skeptical of the self-publishing and vanity press models. Michael Ann Dobbs, at io9, writes that, "Once a sign of slightly deluded grandiosity, self-publishing now looks like a reasonable move for writers," but, still, even after these very public successes,

self-publishing landscape threatens to become a vast wasteland for authors too. They have few ways to get recognition and little to no support. They risk spending years trying to sell books no one seems to want, when a good editor or few more drafts could have made the books successful.

The numbers are pretty dismal. The average book published by a vanity press sells between 40 and 200 copies, according to Jane Smith of How Publishing Really Works. Self Publishing Resources reported that one vanity press with 10,000 titles had seen an average of 75 copies sold per title. If the would-be authors that use Jenkins' service have similar sales, they would pay between $50 and $200 per copy sold, recouping just a few dollars with each sale.

A survey of self-published authors found that over half of them never even sold $500 worth of books.

None of the reports on Jenkins' vanity press or the press' promotional material give any indication for how things would be different for the aspiring authors who use this service. It is true that those who get help with editing, cover design, etc., generally sell more copies than those who don't. Not $9,995 worth of more copies, though. Even if a lot of Jenkins' authors do better than half the self-published authors out there now and sell, say, 168 digital copies on Amazon at $2.99 each and make a gross of $500, they'll pay Amazon 30 percent of that, net $350, and still be more than $9,000 in the red.

This is a vanity press, too, so all the burden of selling will fall on the author, which has led some to call this whole thing a scam.

Victoria Strauss of Writer Beware doesn't use that word, but seems a little flabbergasted by the audacity of this enterprise. There's little to nothing in the way of a plan that would vault one into the ranks of a Hugh Howley or an E.L. James or a William Paul Young. She writes: "Can [Christian Writers Guild Publishing] really be expecting authors to pay nearly $10,000 for a path to publication that doesn't even get their books into retail channels? .... Even with distribution, $9.995 is a hell of a lot of money." According to Strauss, Jenkins' vanity press is expensive even when compared to other vanity presses.

The man who has himself has has more than 200 titles published by traditional publishers responded to such criticism when asked about it by a reporter from Christianity Today. He said the cost is "reasonable only for those who can afford it and want the quality we offer."

And it seems reasonable, of course, to those who believe that this is their way to prove their worthiness to the market, the money understood as a sign of good faith and fealty to the book market's gods.

There's not a market for all the Christian fiction books that are being written right now. But there is, clearly, a market of aspiring novelists willing to pay for the chance, the promise, the hope, of breaking into the little market that there is. Readers may not be consumers, but with a vanity press, books aren't the product, authors' ability to call themselves authors is the product. And there's a burgeoning market for that. This is the first conclusion about the market for Christian fiction that can be drawn from the new project of the always-saavy Jerry Jenkins: there's money to be made off of those who want to be the next Jerry Jenkins.

There's also a constriction of opportunities for traditional publishing. Publishers are just making fewer bets on the unknown, these days. Christian fiction publishers especially.

This isn't entirely new. It's always been the case that Christian fiction presses have been incredibly cautious and tended to put their resources into known commodities. Series have always been popular, new names have always struggled for recognition, and there's always been strong support for established genre fictions and a great leeriness of anything that doesn't have an established audience (i.e., market). But with the book industry as a whole suffering, those tendencies have become even more acute.

Add to that the third thing that can be concluded from Jenkins' latest project, the reality that's inducing angst among publishers and aspiring authors alike: it's just not clear that there's a standard model for success in publishing, anymore. As late as the '90s, it seemed clear what worked. There were paths, routes. Popular fiction publishing seemed like a business with rules, and there was a belief it was possible to know who had the potential to be the next Steven King, the next Danielle Steel, and possible to know what to do with a book that had that potential to launch it into the upper echelons of bestsellerdom.

Jenkins, for one, knew what those rules were, and followed those rules, and reaped his success. He embraced his inner hack, and was willing to do what he had to do to move books.

Now it seems like no one knows what the rules really are. Those who are willing to offer a sacrifice to the market don't know what sort of sacrifice they should be making. If someone tells them the required sacrifice is $10,000, that's at least can seem like a definitive answer.

The bestselling authors of the last decade on the other hand don't seem like they offer models for success, but really seem to be flukes. Stephanie Myer's story is the most traditional, but even it depends on a bit of an accident, where the person who reviewed the manuscript for the agent didn't realize the book was significantly too long and should have been rejected out of hand. E.L. James' path to success is stranger and less likely to serve as a decent model than Meyer's; Steig Larson's success doesn't really seem easily emulatable; and Hugh Howley does not even appear to know how he did what he did, much less what someone else should do if they wanted to do what he did. It all seems very anarchic, right now, like no one knows exactly what one has to do to get a chance to prove worthy of the market.

Which is why some will willingly do what a consummate hack says, and pay that hack $10,000, since he at least has a history of knowing the market and really working it.

Even if "working it" now means selling a different sort of fiction.

But to see how he does it is to see something state of the Christian fiction market right now.

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Religiously unaffiliated now at 20%

One wonders: What happened in 1988?

A new survey, done by the University of Chicago and analyzed by sociologists from UC Berkeley and Duke, puts the religiously unaffiliated at 20 percent of the American population. Atheists, meanwhile, come in at about 3 percent, and don't seem to be growing.  

Elizabeth Drescrer writes:

The report makes clear that the trend away from affiliation with organized religion is not an indication of declining religious belief. They write that “conventional religious belief, typified by belief in God, remains very widespread—59 percent of Americans believe in God without any doubt,” adding that, “Atheism is barely growing,” with 1% in 1962 and 3% in 2012 indicating no belief in God.

Also interesting: even though we've now seen two decades of rapidly growing disaffiliation, the number of those raised outside of religious organizations is still very, very small. Only 8 percent say they were raised without religion. This could be connected to fact that people tend to get more religious when they have children. David E. Campbell and Robert D. Putnam point this out in American Grace. For each generation since the '60s, religious affiliation has increased at about the time that generation has children. 

For those who came of age in the '60s, for example, about 12 percent said they had no religious preference in the mid-'70s. By 1985, though, that number had dropped to about 8 percent. In fact, that generations' irreligion only rose again in the early 2000s, around the time their children came of age. By the end of the 2000s, the generation that came of age in the '60s was again as likely to profess no religious preference as they had been in the mid-'70s. That trend holds for each successive generation. For those who came of age in the 2000s, for example, irreligion spikes in the first few years of the millennium (possibly for historical reasons, rather than generational ones) to the point that 30 percent said they didn't have a religious preference. But then that number drops. By the late 2000s, 25 percent say they have no religious preference. They're still, of course, a lot less religious than previous generations, but it seems that even a lot of that 25 percent will raise their children with a religious preference. 

All the normal caveats about misinterpreting and over-interpreting this data from this new study apply. What we might be looking at, here, is the waning usefulness of the term "religion."

The question asked, specifically, was: "What is your religious preference? Is it Protestant, Catholic, Jewish, some other religion, or no religion?" That's slightly different that the question asked by Pew, and the difference in the phrasing of the question could account for the difference in answers. 

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'Praying over mozzarella sticks'

A funny little rip-on and identification-with the so-called "nones" from Memphis rapper Skewby, from his album "Humble Pie":

Don't be ashamed to tell me what you believe in
Caught you praying over mozzarella sticks
So I'm wondering if your preference is a deacon
Or you call yourself spiritual-not-religious when you sleep in
Would say I skip church 'cause everybody pretends
But name a place where everybody real
People so fake inside the club, they keep the lights off
Why you think I ain't been in one in a couple years?

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In the days of the ark

Today marks the grand opening of an ark: a San Antonio megachurch's 24,800-square-feet replica of the apocalypse-surviving boat of Genesis 6, 7 and 8. The structure is two-stories, has 13 classrooms and is designed to hold 850 children. It also houses a number of animatronic animals including a talking macaw and a giraffe that raises and lowers its head.

The animals have names like "John Bunyan" and "Dietrich Bonhoeffer."

A facebook page dedicated to The Ark calls it a "place of fun, learning and worship" for toddlers and Kindergarten-age children.

My San Antonio reports:

Called The Ark, it cost almost $5 million and will open to the public Saturday and for church programs the next day. It aims to spur wonderment but also to underscore the Bible's authenticity, said Matthew Hagee, executive pastor. 

"I want them to say it happened," he said. "The Ark was real. Salvation is real. What God desires for Noah, God desires for me. For Noah, it was a boat. And for me, it was Jesus Christ." 

In recent years, churches nationwide have ramped up resources for innovative children's buildings, mindful of their appeal to young families, and Noah's Ark has enjoyed longstanding popularity for such spaces. A Christian theme park in Kentucky is building a full-scale replica.  

But the scale and sophistication of Cornerstone's new facility -- and particularly its collection of electronically controlled animal replicas -- might be unmatched nationally, say experts in Christian children's ministry.

A children's minister at the church told the media the ark is meant to compete with the "whiz-bang Disney stuff," and to send a message to parents: "We don't just want your kids to come here and learn. We want them to experience God."

The imitation boat manages to symbolize a lot of the distinctive messages of the megachurch, including its emphasis on the historicity of such Bible stories as Noah and the ark, and also its emphasis on apocalypticism.

Cornerstone was founded in the 1970s by controversial Pentecostal pastor John Hagee, who is still the senior minister of the 20,000-member church. The biblical character Noah has figured into the teachings of both the older and the younger Hagee. Mathew Hagee preached a sermon series called "Build an Ark" about "the divine warnings the Word of God gives us about the day an age in which we live." Noah's ark, he said,

tells us that the wise pay attention, they make a plan … they are prepared. When something changes in their life, they are not affected.  

I pray that you will become aware of the situations surrounding you and that you will begin to build yourself an ark. I want you to build yourself a spiritual ark for your family to take refuge in, a financial ark to provide for your children and your grandchildren, an ark for your marriage, and an ark for your ministry. Ultimately, in every area of your life, I want you to consider how you can be better prepared for the things that are coming your way so when they do come, and trust me they will come, it is not a matter of if you will be victorious, but for certain that you will live in total triumph.

The elder Hagee also mentions Noah and the ark in a recent book where he suggested the apocalypse could begin on December 12, 2012. John Hagee opens the book, Can America Survive?, by comparing the nation to another gigantic boat, the Titanic. He writes:

Why do I belabor this point?

Because America, believed to be the most powerful and 'unsinkable' nation on the face of the earth, is now racing across the stage of history in a similar perfect storm -- this one driven by the winds of political correctness, economic meltdowns leading to the death of the dollar, the rejection of Israel, the maniacal nuclear ambitions of the theocratic dictatorship in Iran, the ten prophetic signs that we are the terminal generation now being fulfilled in Biblical prophecy for the first time in world history, and the very real fact that in the near future planet Earth is going to experience, on a specific day, global ecological disaster in which a third of humanity will die.

The tenth "sign," according to Hagee, is the similarity between the world today and the world "in the days of Noah."

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American papal ambivalencies

Peter Manseau reflects on the American mass media's historically confused and contradictory relationship with the pope, at once fawning and admiring and also openly hostile:

The first time Time put a pope on its cover -- June 16, 1924 -- it tried to split the difference between the era's rampant anti-Catholicism and the 'Great Man' narratives that were then its stock and trade. Beneath an illustration depicting Pope Pius XI as bespectacled, human, and approachable (literally soft-around the edges, thanks to the artist’s light touch) there appeared words offering a decidedly more ominous message: 'No Popery!' 

[...] 

The ambivalent relationship between the leader of the Roman Catholic Church and the American media has continued ever since. There is no other job opening on earth that would receive so much attention -- despite, or maybe due to, the fact that many prominent journalists are openly hostile to the teachings of the Church.

Much of this is the legacy of the man who boldly put both a pope and 'popery' on the cover of his magazine almost ninety year ago: a Protestant missionary’s son who found himself in bed with the Church in more ways than one. For Henry Luce, there was of course the actual Catholic with whom he shared his home -- Clare Boothe Luce -- but there was also an unabashed affinity for the Olympian authority the Vatican represented, which was similar to the kind which he imagined his publications would offer each week.

Julie Byrne, author of the forthcoming The Other Catholics, takes a look at the currents within contemporary American Catholicism that are really pretty ambivalent about the papacy -- including "Old Catholics," and also the fastest growing contingency of the American church, Latinos. She writes:

According to one recent survey fewer than three out of ten U.S. Roman Catholics says that the “teaching authority claimed by the Vatican” is “very important” to them. 

U.S. Roman Catholicism is now fully one-third Latino, and this is another group that does not simply accede to papal centrality. 

The vitality of devotion to the Virgin of Guadalupe, the mother of Jesus manifested at Guadalupe, often far surpasses concerns for the pope. Especially among Mexican-Americans, who make up more than 60 percent of U.S. Hispanics, she is the living center of faith. Only half jokingly, some Latino Catholics say they are not Romans, but Guadalupeans.

The relationships that Americans -- Catholic and non-Catholic -- have to the Vatican and the papacy are much more nuanced and complicated than generally depicted. It's been pointed out that the politics of the new pope, Pope Francis, don't map neatly onto US divisions and US concerns. There's a lot confusion about what this or that signal "means," and who wins here, who loses. What's maybe more useful and more interesting, though, is to think about the ambivalences: how traditionalist Catholics, who are very authoritarian in inclination, are upset about Pope Francis; how progressive Catholics are conflicted or oppositional, both excited and dismayed by things Cardinal Bergoglio has and has not done; how the media cares very much and yet makes basic mistakes; how political conservatives are pro-papacy and treat the papacy as a defense against progressivism, and yet are uncomfortable with popes' critiques of capitalism, including Francis' participation in a statement condemning "the negative consequences of globalization and the tyranny of markets." Add to that the lapsed Catholics and ex-Catholics, the Eastern Orthodox and Episcopalians and Lutherans, those who think the papacy is the antichrist and evangelicals who talk of the pope as the leader of "global Christianity," plus the spiritual-but-not-religious who sometimes see the pope as spiritual, sometimes as religious, plus the non-religious who are nonetheless watching when the white smoke ascends from the Sistine Chapel.

There is a way in which it is true that "we" have a pope, but it involves a lot of conflicted feelings.

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Habemusnt papam

A joke: The Lone Ranger and Tonto are surrounded. Indian warriors are on all sides and there's no way out. The Lone Ranger is panicking. He looks to Tonto and says, "what do we do know?"

Tonto says, "what do you mean 'we,' kemosabe?"

Anyway, they're saying "we" have a new pope.

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Parham and the contested boundaries of Pentecostal experience

Charles Fox Parham's historical significance is due to one fact: he was the first to outline and define early Pentecostal theology of glossolali, the experience that Pentecostals call "speaking in tongues." He himself wasn’t the first to have the ecstatic experience of "spirit baptism," and utter unknown words in an unknown language, but rather, as the religious leader at the Bethel Bible School in Topeka, Kansas in 1901 he was the one who theologized the experience of others. He said that the tongues were tongues. He said the experience was the spiritual gift of a new language, the evidence of sanctification, and the tool that God would use to spread the gospel at the end of time. In Ann Taves' terminology, he was the one who deemed the experience of tongues a religious experience. Parham referred to himself as the movement's "projector." In light of Taves' work, he might more precisely be called the "ascriber," as he is the one who set this particular experience apart as special, founding this specific religious tradition with his ascriptions.

Lesser known, but perhaps also significant, is another aspect of Parham's work as founder and leader of the nascent Pentecostal movement. He spent much of his time, from 1901 on, aggressively contesting the validity of Pentecostals’ ecstatic experiences.

After he started the movement, Parham was among its fiercest critics. According to historian Grant Wacker, he dismissed the Azusa Street revival in Los Angeles, one of the most successful moments of early Pentecostalism, as "holy-rolling-dancing-jumping, shaking, jabbering, chattering, wind-sucking and giving vent to meaningless sounds and noises." Many ecstatic experiences that others deemed the work of the Holy Ghost were, for Parham, "disorders." He dedicated himself, time and again, to brusque denunciations of experiences he considered to be lewd or racially inferior, manifestations of "the flesh" or "spook spirits" in "wild, weird prayer services."

These efforts to police the boundaries of Pentecostal experience have not gone unnoticed in Pentecostal historiography. Yet, they haven't been foregrounded, either. They have been considered as secondary or even tertiary in the beginnings of this movement, construed normally as curious but not critically important power struggles. Taves' work suggests it might be fruitful for historians to re-focus on these disputes.

Read Other Reasons to Unpack 'Religious Experience', my response to Ann Taves' interview with The Religious Studies Project.

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A materialist account of historical possibility

A materialist account of historical possibility is interested not in motives for action but in the conditions that produce and contour such motives, the conditions in which our actions are iterated, and the conditions with which our actions interact to produce certain effects.... A materialist understanding of history does not imply that economic imperatives 'cause' or directly 'determine' human experience; rather, within a certain order of economic and attendant social relations, there are many possibilities for belief and action. But there are not infinite possibilities.

-- Wendy Brown, "The Sacred, the Secular, and the Profane: Charles Taylor and Karl Marx"

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A theory of famous and forgotten atheists

In the New York Times, in a review of Susan Jacoby's new book on Robert Ingersoll, there's a proposed theory of famous and forgotten atheists, and of why they're famous or forgotten. It's not clear if the theory is Jacoby's or the reviewers' (presumably it's Jacoby's), but this is the theory:

There have been atheists and religious doubters throughout history, but the ones who remain famous after their deaths tend to have been equally famous for something else as well; otherwise, people most notable for their bravery in the face of religious conservatism have to be celebrated by a population equally brave, and that is often too much to ask.

Is this true?

Besides the problem of the question of the definition of "atheist" and whether there have been those "throughout history," and how "atheist" and "religious doubter" are being mushed together, is this true?  Is there really any way to divide public religion-doubters in such a way as to predict their permanence, their public memory?

The model for the remembered atheist/religious doubter that is being proposed here would apparently be Thomas Paine; Ingersoll's the model of the forgotten atheist. Paine had the "something else" of the American Revolution and the French Revolution. But then, it's not like Ingersoll did nothing but doubt at the religious. He fought in the Civil War. He had an active political career.

Maybe it's just the vagueness of "something else as well" I am having a problem with. It seems very unclear what this wouldn't apply to.

Did Ayn Rand do something else? Probably that's how her other political and artistic efforts would be thought of here, though she might not have accepted those distinctions separating her philosophy from everything else. Did Madalyn Murray O'Hair do something besides atheist activism? It wouldn't seem so, but surely she counts as one who's remained famous. Emma Goldman could fit into the Paine model of an atheist who's remembered but who's "equally famous for something else." What about Marcet Haldeman-Julius? She did lots of other things besides doubt, but isn't particularly remembered, I don't think.

Besides, isn't it because one is remembered that multiple aspects of one's life and work are remembered?  Not the other way around.

The proposed theory of why remembered atheists are remembered elides over the many complications of the functions of discourses that publicly preserve a memory. In place of a more nuanced explanation for why some public figures remain that way after death and others do not, it slides into talk of "celebration" and "bravery." Which is to say, it into a case for a kind of hagiography.

The proposed theory seems like it's going to be a historical argument, an interesting explanatory device. But then it  seems like it turns out to be really something else entirely.

This is my concern with Jacoby's history of American freethinkers, and why I'm skeptical about her book on Ingersoll.

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Judge: pastor not protected from public criticism, accusations

Pastors are public figures, and aren't completely protected from former members' online criticism and accusations, according to a California judge.

Bob Grenier, the pastor of a Calvary Chapel church in central California, is suing his step-son, Alex Grenier, for defamation. The pastor claims he is being attacked and his reputation is being ruined by his step-son's blog and internet activities, activities that Alex Grenier says are designed to call attention to allegations of a long history of physical abuse, sexual abuse, and "ecclesiastical corruption."

According to the lawsuit, "Alex continues to this day to conduct a cyber-bully hate campaign by scouring the internet continuously, hour-by-hour, day-by-day, for the purpose of generating negative posts about his Parents." The suit claims the younger Grenier uses as many as nine websites "aimed at ruining credibility of Parents," regularly accusing the elder Grenier of child molestation and stealing from the church.

Two of the pastor's other sons -- adopted and biological -- have confirmed Alex Grenier's accounts of abuse.

Bob Grenier of course denies these allegations, but the primary case that's being made in the California court is that such allegations should not even be allowed. Similar to the argument that Sovereign Grace Ministries' lawyers are making in a Maryland court, the point is to protect internal affairs from outside scrutiny. In this week's preliminary ruling, however, a California judge rejected the idea that Bob Grenier's purportedly private affairs were really private and should be protected as private.

The judge ruled that the pastor is a "limited purpose public figure," and as such subject to a fair amount of public criticism.



Statements about public figures are only defamatory if they false statements, damaging statements, and published with "reckless disregard for the truth."This means that Bob Grenier does not just have to prove that his step-son's online statements were wrong and hurtful, but that Alex knowingly published false information intending to harm his step-father. According to the preliminary decision, the pastor is a public figure, and the bar is raised for claims of defamation:

Plaintiff, as pastor of Calvary Chapel Visalia, has placed himself in the public eye sufficiently to be considered a Limited Purpose Public Figure. Defendants have submitted evidence showing that Plaintiff has a Web site promoting his church and has video feeds of church services available through the Web site. Additionally, Plaintiff has published and distributed a book about his activities as a church leader, and has been active in various community events such as the mayor’s annual prayer breakfast and as a volunteer chaplain with the local police department. Plaintiff has also been active in producing and promoting regional church activities. In these public activities, Plaintiff claims to adhere to, teach, counsel, and to promote high standards of Christian morality and the teachings of the Bible, topics of substantial public interest. The evidence submitted supports Defendants’ claims that Plaintiff sought to have not only church members but others in the community see him as a church leader.

Such court decisions are good news for the growing number of online "survivor" communities that share and bring attention to allegations of "spiritual abuse." It's bad news for the many churches that want to squelch such public criticism of how they counsel members.

The court is scheduled to hear arguments about "reckless disregard for the truth" in the Grenier vs. Grenier case in April.

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God's Cartoonist: The Comic Crusade of Jack Chick (full film)

Jason C. Bivens, in Religion of Fear: The Politics of Horror in Conservative Evangelicalism:

Chick writes himself into and out of fallen America, making connections and establishing resolutions that are as succinct as a thought ballon, as emphatic as a trio of exclamation points. The social and cultural history of Chick Publications is a marginal one, both insofar as Chick has doggedly maintained his status as an underground artist fighting 'the world system' and also in the sense that his important contributions to evangelical popular culture have gone largely unacknowledged by scholars of American religions. Yet his sensibility is a powerful one in its widespread accessibility, its longevity, and the influence it has had on several generations of American Christians. No matter how fervently one might seek to ignore them, Chick tracts keep turning up, often in the oddest places.

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Abstracts: regarding contemporary evangelical cultural engagements

The Kincade Case for Kincade: The Painter of Light’s Arguments for His Art 

When Thomas Kincade died in 2012, his images hung in one out of every twenty American homes. His works sold for up to $250 million annually, and were regularly dismissed as kitsch. Kincade, however, continually argued with the gatekeepers of the art establishment about the importance and aesthetic value of his work. He positioned himself as peer to Daimen Hirst and Jeff Koons, and also Walt Disney, refusing to accept that popularity was antithetical to artistic value, or that his ideological embrace of sentimentality meant he could never be taken seriously. This paper traces those career-long struggles.

Previous scholars -- notably in Thomas Kincade: The Artist in the Mall, edited by Alexis L. Boylan -- reevaluated Kincade by considering him in the context of conceptual and transgressive art, problematizing distinctions between art and kitsch. This paper seeks to further that reevaluation, demonstrating that Kincade’s own arguments should be taken seriously.

Explaining the Market for Christian Fiction

Christian fiction occupies a peculiar place in twenty first century America. Despite significant commercial success and these novels’ regular best-seller status, people are still surprised Christian fiction exists. Readers puzzle over reasons for Christian fiction genres on websites such as Goodreads, and express shock in one-star reviews on Amazon.com. Cultural critics psychoanalyze Christian fiction readers, speculating on their pathologies and on what the popularity of these novels says about contemporary American.

This paper proposes a better answer to the question of why Christian fiction exists. Examining historical developments in twentieth and twenty-first century book markets and critically examining the evolution of what Robert Darnton called books’ “communications circuit,” i.e., processes of authorship, publication, distribution, sales and consumption, the argument is made that the Christian fiction readership should be demystified and “detotalized.” Shifts in consumer capitalism, rather than readers’ religious pathologies, account for the market for Christian fiction.

Re-considering Demonization in Popular Spiritual Warfare Fiction

Demonization marks the end of the possibility of reasonable discourse. When opponents are characterized as demonic and disagreements are not thought of as matters of method or degree but rather as about ultimate fealty to forces of good and evil, dialogue is rendered impossible.

The prominence and success of spiritual warfare fiction in the last 35 years, then, would seem to be another sign of the intractability of America’s “culture war.” In this wildly popular genre of evangelical Christian fiction, cultural conflicts are depicted as the machinations of Satanic forces. The metaphor of “demonization” is imagined in the most literal ways. Millions of readers avidly consume these novels, where demons are elaborately realized and contemporary social reality is re-rendered as spiritual battle. Imaginations formed by such fictions, it would seem, would be completely closed to compromise. As journalist Daniel Radosh wrote, speaking on behalf of liberals, “common ground will never be possible because they don't object to specific ideas that can be reframed or adjusted. They object to Satan, whose bidding we are doing.”

Counterintuitively, this paper argues that this genre of evangelical fiction doesn’t foreclose discourse, but opens new possibilities. The paper closely examines representations of the demonic realms of cultural conflicts in the popular fiction of contemporary Pentecostal novelists such as Frank Peretti, Tosca Lee and Linda Rios Brooks, and considers them in the context of theories of ideology and ideological conflict. Investigating specific instances of the conceptualization of spiritual warfare enables a more nuanced and thorough understanding of the function of imagined demons, demonstrating the multiple ways the fictive depictions of demonic spheres serve to move readers to more open and even empathetic engagement with those with whom they disagree. Fictions of demonization mark out a possible space for dialogue, rather than obdurate disagreement.

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An emerging alliance in defense of sharia

The attacks on sharia law in American have been vociferous and completely out of proportion with actual instances of sharia law in America. A coalition of conservatives with various concerns have sought to enact legislation prohibiting sharia -- prohibiting state judges from considering religious codes that Muslims believe to be binding and might, e.g., have cited in private contracts, or even going so far as to enact legislation that equates adherence to the Islamic rules for worship with terrorism, so that "sharia organizations," including mosques, would be illegal.

Defenders of sharia against these state prohibitions are now arising from a perhaps unexpected quarter. Sharia has an ally with some Jewish legal thinkers and some Jewish groups concerned about the way these laws infringe on religious liberty.

From Florida:

A Florida state bill targeting a supposed threat from Islamic law may instead end up preventing Orthodox couples from using Jewish religious courts, or batei din, to arbitrate their divorces, according to legal specialists and some Jewish groups. 

[....] 

The Council on American-Islamic Relations has vowed to fight the bill. So too has the strictly Orthodox umbrella organization Agudath Israel of America.

There are other problems with the proposed Florida law, including the fact it is worded so ambiguously that it's not at all clear how the courts might apply the legislation. One Jewish state representative is arguing that the law is designed to have no legal effect at all, actually, and is merely meant to "generate fear of Muslims," reinforcing some of the political rhetoric of recent days.

What's interesting, though, is this alliance between a religious Jewish groups and Islamic groups. An important feature of fights over religious liberty in the United States is the way that different groups end up politically allied, with common cause. This was true in 1802, when Deists and Baptists came together in opposition to the establishment of religion, and in 1989, when the Native American Church's religious use of peyote was defended by the Traditional Values Coalition, the Christian Legal Society, the National Association of Evangelicals and the American Jewish Congress in their push to enact the Religious Freedom Restoration Act.

As the political landscape shifts, groups that might otherwise have little in common come together. Change, in these sorts of affairs, seems to happen by this process of alliances.

Others have noted the possible common cause of Muslims' wanting to defend their right to use sharia in some limited legal contracts and so forth and other religious groups in America. Eric N. Kniffen, of the Beckett Fund for Religious Liberty, has argued that the case against Muslims' religious practice in America is historically similar to the cases made against Jews, Mormons and Catholics, implying that those groups ought to sympathize with and even support American Muslims in these political struggles. Matthew Schmitz, of First Things, made the argument that there's no reason to be more suspicious of Muslims' claims to religious freedom than of Protestants' or Catholics', and that there is, rather, a common cause the three groups could share: protecting the US Constitution against illiberal excesses. Eliyahu Stern, a religious studies and history professor at Yale, also made a case in the New York Times for the specific alliance of Jews and Muslims in opposition to a ban on sharia.

It has seemed to me, though, that those alliances was mostly theoretical. Jewish groups' sympathies for Muslims' rights to religious exercise have been mixed. For example, in the controversy over Perk51 -- the so-called "Ground Zero Mosque" -- there seemed to a lot of conflict between Jewish groups, and even within Jewish groups.

It's too early to tell for sure, but perhaps that's changing. There are at least some efforts being made at the moment to flesh out the connections between Jewish religious practice in American and Muslim religious practice in America, and how their relationship to America law is identical. In Chicago, next month, for example, there's a conference of religious scholars and legal scholars considering the topic of "Shari'a and Halakha in America." There are experts on Judaism and on Islam scheduled to attend, as well as one scholar from a evangelical Christian school. At the conference, they plan to consider:

how liberal democracies can and should accommodate legal systems that are not themselves originally grounded on liberal or democratic principles [and] to what degree can systems of this sort adapt themselves to a liberal democratic environment? This conference will explore these questions, as they pertain to both shari'a and Jewish law (halacha).

The questions are good, but what's more important is the combination of Jewish and Muslim religious laws as the subjects of the question. Whether or not such efforts change the political landscape remains to be seen, but this is the sort of shift that does change things.

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