'I cannot trust the Christian church'

James Baldwin, on the racism of America's white churches:

In The Fire Next Time, Baldwin writes that African Americans have generally been bewildered that white Americans think of themselves as they do, as obviously good, and good at heart, despite the evidence of their institutions and history. He writes:

The American Negro has the great advantage of having never believed the collection of myths to which white Americans cling: that their ancestors were all freedom-loving heroes, that they were born in the greatest country the world has ever seen, or that Americans are invincible in battle and wise in peace, that Americans have always dealt honorably with Mexicans and Indians and all other neighbors or inferiors, that American men are the world's most direct and virile, that American women are pure. Negros know far more about white Americans than that; it can almost be said, in fact, that they know about white Americans what parents -- or, anyway, mothers -- know about their children, and that they often regard white Americans that way. And perhaps this attitude, held in spite of what they know and thwat they have endured, helps to explain why Negroes, on the whole, and until lately, have allowed themselves to feel so little hatred. The tendency really has been, insofar as this was possible, to dismiss white people as the slightly mad victims of their own brainwashing.

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Atheist takes questions in Mississippi church

A Mississippi Church of Christ -- a conservative church in a conservative state -- interviews an atheist, Neil Carter of Godless in Dixie, in a very open, cordial discussion. Carter starts the conversation:

People like me are out there, and it'd be interesting to have a conversation. What I have found is now that I'm on the outside of this tradition, I'm often misunderstood by people who just two or three or years ago would not have had such strange reactions to me. It's like I'm painted a different color and have a third eye on my forheard, sometimes, if I tell them I'm not a Christian.

Starting at 7:08, Carter lists top 11 things atheists wish Christians knew about them.

At 29:09, Carter talks about how Christians can better evangelize, and challenges American Christians to experience how atheists are treated in their communities.

At 30:05, Carter takes questions. The first is pretty fascinating, and represents the tenor of this conversation: "We as Christians have periods of doubt. Do you have periods of doubt in reverse?"

Hemant Mehta writes, "If you want an example of what an ideal Christian/atheist dialogue looks like, watch this video."

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Francis Schaeffer and the death of Baby Doe

Francis Schaeffer's 1982 message to the Presbyterians at Coral Ridge Presbyterian Church in Fort Lauderdale, Fla., was pretty simple: the philosophy of modern society is humanism, and humanism means death.

The speech was part of Schaeffer's book tour for A Christian Manifesto, which had been published the year before. That book and tour, along with 1976's book and film series How Shall We Then Live? and 1979's book and film Whatever Happened to the Human Race?, all made a sustained argument about the need for Christian activism. The pro-life movement, as such, can be traced to these arguments; the religious right as a "bloc" and a single, mobilized, political entity, was formed in part by these efforts. Schaeffer made the historical and philosophical case that undergirded the emerging movement.

The argument was about attitudes towards life and death.

Attitudes exemplified by the issue of infanticide.

The case Schaeffer made to the Presbyterians hinged on claims about infanticide, its prevalence and its popular acceptability. His philosophical critique of modern America and his proscriptive solution of Christian action both depended on the accuracy of his cultural analysis. Both were dependent on the question of whether or not Schaeffer was right about the way the world was at that moment. For that reason alone, it's worth inquiring into the question of infants killed by doctors in 1982.

The answer to the question of whether or not Schaeffer was right about infanticide in 1982 will go some ways towards answering the questions of whether or not he was right about the modern world, and right or not about humanism.

Schaeffer's abstract, philosophical critique was a critique of humanism. This is constant throughout his work, and was essential to the point he was making in February 1982.

Schaeffer told the people at Coral Ridge:

What we are facing is Humanism: Man, the measure of all things -- viewing final reality being only material or energy shaped by chance -- therefore, human life having no intrinsic value -- therefore, the keeping of any individual life or any groups of human life, being purely an arbitrary choice by society at the given moment.

This is not an obvious argument. Humanism, as articulated in the two Humanist Manifestoes, explicitly and adamantly affirms the value of human life. The first Humanist Manifesto, written in 1933, concludes with the claim that humanism will "affirm life rather than deny it." The second Humanist Manifesto, written in '73, states that "the preciousness and dignity of the individual person is a central humanist value." Schaeffer is claiming that the humanists are wrong about what humanists believe. Or, more precisely, that they misunderstand the logical consequences of consistently holding to their humanist epistemology and ontology. They don't see the contradiction between denying God and excluding revelation and the supernatural from conversations about public policies, on the one hand, and upholding the value of human life on the other. For Schaeffer, the humanists may say that human life has value but they can't say it is intrinsically valuable, and that makes all the difference.

This is not just an abstract claim, though. Schaeffer was making an argument about what was actually happening in American at that moment. He claimed that this social development was visible: Humanism has taken over and has wrought death.

As evidence of this, he offered the current practice of doctors and nurses committing infanticide. Those who looked, he said, would see how humanism, in practice, meant the devaluation of human life:

Believe me, it's everywhere. It isn't just abortion. It's infanticide. It's allowing the babies to starve to death after they are born. If they do not come up to some doctor's concept of a quality of life worth living. I'll just say in passing -- and never forget it -- it takes about 15 days, often, for these babies to starve to death....

So what we find then, is that the medical profession has largely changed -- not all doctors. I'm sure there are doctors here in the audience who feel very, very differently, who feel indeed that human life is important and you wouldn't take it, easily, wantonly. But, in general, we must say (and all you have to do is look at the TV programs), all you have to do is hear about the increased talk about allowing the Mongoloid child -- the child with Down's Syndrome -- to starve to death if it's born this way. Increasingly, we find on every side the medical profession has changed its views. The view now is, "Is this life worth saving?"

This is not a philosophical claim. It's a claim, rather, about what was actually happening in 1982, and should be a matter of record, a claim that could be verified. Where arguments about what humanists "really" believe are not likely to go anywhere, it should be a simple enough matter to establish whether or not Schaeffer was right about what was happening in American hospitals in 1982. Note that he was not here making a slippery slope argument, saying that the legalization of abortion will at some future date end up meaning that infanticide is an accepted practice. That's common in pro-life rhetoric, and Schaeffer made that argument too, but that's not what Schaeffer was saying here. He was making the claim that there was a general practice in the medical profession -- i.e., an implementation of humanism -- such that certain sorts of infants were being starved to death.

Is this true?

Were newborns being regularly killed in American hospitals -- easily, wantonly, and so on?

No.

There's one particularly famous case from that same year that would seem, on one level, to confirm what Schaeffer argued. An infant born with Down's syndrome was allowed to starve to death in a hospital in Bloomington, Indiana, in 1982, two months after Schaeffer's Florida speech. Some of the basic facts might seem to confirm his claims, but the details of that case show that Schaeffer was wrong -- importantly -- about the majority attitudes towards life and death in American hospitals. The full story of the Baby Doe case, as it's called, seriously undermine Schaeffer's argument.

Here's what happened: a child was born on Good Friday, April 1982. He was born with Down's syndrome and a disorder of the digestive system, esophageal atresia. This meant he could not eat.

There were three doctors in the case. Two recommended transporting the infant immediately to another hospital where emergency surgery could be preformed. The surgery had a 90 percent chance of success. The third -- the doctor who actually delivered the child -- said that there was another option that the parents had to consider.

They could let their child die.

The third doctor, Walter Owens, said the surgery would be painful, and possibly only the first of many, and the child would still have Down's. He suspected there were also other issues, such as brain damage. He said the child would be a "mere blob." They had a choice and they needed to know they had a choice that they had to make.

The family, which had had experiences with children with Down's, decided to let their child die. Owens told them they were being courageous, and said, "Here's how I look at it. If you let the baby die, you're going to grieve a little while. But if you go ahead with this surgery, you're going to grieve for the rest of your lives."

To this point, the story seems to align exactly with what Schaeffer predicted. Owens was a Unitarian-Universalist, incidentally, which would also fit Schaeffer's cultural analysis of the betrayal of Reformed Christian worldview and its consequences.

The story goes on, however. One of the doctors recommending the emergency surgery -- who happened to be named Schaffer -- fought for the infant's life. He appealed to the hospital authorities, and they brought in a judge on Saturday night to make a decision about this case. According to Jeff Lyons, who wrote the history of the Baby Doe case (1, 2, 3, 4), the judge was at home coloring Easter eggs with his children when the call came, and there was an emergency hearing at the hospital.

Lyons writes:

At issue was nothing less than whether parents ever have the right to refuse live-saving treatment for their children and whether a life of handicap is so abysmal as to warrant its termination at birth. 

Only rarely in American jurisprudence had such questions been raised. On the few occasions on which they had, the courts had almost invariably ruled against the parents and in favor of life. But in those instances the doctors had always been lined up against the parents. 

In Bloomington, however, it was a different matter. There existed a strong--one might say vehement--difference of clinical opinion as to what the best course of treatment was.

After hearing the evidence and the testimony of the conflicting doctors, as well as the arguments of the hospital's lawyers and a cleric, the judge took 30 minutes to deliberate. Then he ruled that it was not the court's place to make this decision: when a family is presented with two options by medical professionals, it is their right to make the choice about which course of action to take concerning a newborn infant. The family in this case had made their decision, and the child would die.

That wasn't the end of it, though.

The nurses revolted. A sign was taped to Baby Doe's crib saying "Do Not Feed." Possibly this was because of the problem with the infant's esophagus, but it was taken as a symbol of the parent's decision to starve their child. The head nurse saw the sign and responded: "Over my dead body." En masse, the nurses threatened to strike.

Francis Schaeffer, from a certain perspective, seems prescient here. At Coral Ridge, two months before, he had said that nurses would be asked to participate in the death of infants. He predicted there would be signs on cribs that said "Do Not Feed," and that nurses would be fired if they refused to follow those orders. The nurses in Bloomington did refuse, though, and they weren't fired. The hospital took their side. Instead of firing the nurses, the child was moved out of the nursery, taken to another floor, and the family was required to hire private nurses.

There was also immediate, fierce criticism of the judge, and so the decision was referred to the state's Child Protection Committee, with a guardian appointed to represent the interests of the child in that hearing. After 45 minutes of deliberation, Lyons reports, the committee returned with the same decision, affirming the rights of the parent's to make this medical decision.

Neither the court nor the committee, it's worth noting, never made any sort of decision about the value of the infant's life, or about the ways in which, perhaps, quality of life could be measured against life itself. Rather, they considered and made a ruling about who has the right to the final decision about how to respond to an infant's serious medical condition when doctors disagree. They decided, very conservatively, that the state does not have the power, nor does the hospital. The rights are the parents', in consultation with their physicians.

There was another legal challenge the next day, when the county prosecutor tried to have the child declared neglected, giving the state the authority to overrule the parent's decision. That failed, and there were then a series of other efforts: a local attorney acting on behalf of the county prosecutor applied for a temporary restraining order agains the parents; a lawyer for the National Right to Life Association filed a petition on behalf of a couple that wanted to adopt Baby Doe; an appeal was made to the Indiana Supreme Court; plans were made to appeal to the Supreme Court.

All of these failed. Mostly for legal and technical reasons.

The parents, meanwhile, named the child Walter after Owens, the doctor who'd recommended they let him die. They had the infant baptized into the Catholic Church by their parish priest. They asked their nurses when the ordeal would be over.

Others continued to fight for the infant's life, nevertheless. Protestors gathered outside the hospital with signs. The doctor who strongly recommended the emergency surgery, Schaffer, tried to break into Baby Doe's room to administer an IV, to feed the dying child. Lyon's calls it "one of the most bizarre episodes in the history of American medicine, an episode that saw one doctor guard a dying baby from another doctor who was threatening to try and save its life." The rescue mission only stopped because it was too late. The doctor said he knew that feeding the dying infant intravenously could cost him his medical license or even result in criminal charges of kidnapping. But he didn't care. It was too late, though.

At six days old, denied medical treatment and denied food, Baby Doe died.

There don't seem to be any reliable figures to indicate how many similar cases occurred in the United States in 1982. It's just not known if, as Schaeffer said, such practices were "everywhere." The fact that this case received such attention, though, and evoked such a strong response, suggests that letting Down's children or otherwise handicapped children die was not common or commonly accepted. A similar case in 1983 received similar attention, and similarly garnered outrage from the public, the medical community and legal community, indicating that while there were some doctors doing this sort of thing, they faced overwhelming resistance.

Schaeffer's description of the culture, where "the medical profession has largely changed," is simply factually wrong.

But what should be made of this? It seems significant that he was wrong. Schaeffer's cultural analysis and his philosophical analysis in this 1982 speech depended very much on the truth of the claim that infanticide was happening, and happening without any resistance. The entire argument that he made in Fort Lauderdale, Fla., can be summed up with these two arguments that both rest on this purported fact of infanticide: modern society is humanist, humanism results in the devaluation of life, and thus the modern world is now a place where infants with Down's are being nonchalantly killed.

But they weren't, though. Not nonchalantly.

According to reports, even in such liberal quarters as the Washington Post, Baby Doe's death was considered a tragedy. The American Academy of Pediatrics expressed "open concern that Baby Does' obstetric physician had made a mistake, that poor advice was given to the family and that such an event should be avoided." An article published in the Western Journal of Medicine said the doctor made a "serious judgement error," because of his own prejudice and bias. The next year, in response to the public outcry, every hospital that received federal funding was required to prominently post signs announcing "discriminatory failure to feed and care for handicapped infants ... is prohibited by federal law." Several laws were passed, following the case. Reflecting on the case 20 years later, the judge who'd been called to the Bloomington hospital on Easter eve noted that "if this situation had happened in present-day courts, there would be no doubt all action would have been taken to save the baby's life because of new state and federal laws that prohibit such acts."

If Walter Owens received any support in this case, for his opinion that the child should be allowed to die, it wasn't very vocal. Even those who opposed the Baby Doe regulations went out of their way to make it clear that they thought the doctor made a horrible decision.

All of this points to the fact that Schaeffer was wrong. The reaction to the Baby Doe case shows that the America of 1982 was not the kind of place that Francis Schaeffer thought it was. While there may have been a few who, in specific cases, asked the question, "Is this life worth saving?," that was clearly not happening "on every side." When you look at what actually was the case, what you find is the opposite of what Schaeffer said would be found. People overwhelmingly wanted to keep this infant alive, and valued his life enough to try to get the government to take away the parents' legal rights.

Schaeffer's message, to Coral Ridge Presbyterian Church and in those tours in 1976, '79 and '82, was about the dangers of humanism, and how Christians should wake up because humanism had taken over their world, reshaped their country, and put the lives of America's most vulnerable in jeopardy. In this specific instance, he made very concrete claims about how that was happening, but it's clear he was wrong.

Schaeffer's cultural analysis was mistaken.

The only possible conclusions, it seems, is that either he was wrong about humanism having taken over America, or, alternatively, it's just not the case that humanism devalues human life in the way Schaeffer said it did.

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I is for infidel

The Gospel of Slavery: A Primer of Freedom, written by a Unitarian minister and published in Philadelphia in 1864. More information at Slate's new history blog, The Vault.

This argument, interestingly, that faith was undermined by contorted arguments about slavery, was often made by the other side, by those supporting the positive good of the institution of slavery. Christian abolitionists were regularly condemned for not reading the Bible literally, and betraying true, orthodox Christianity in their (radical) attempts to abolish slavery. One standard argument, from the South, was that the pro-slavery forces were actually preserving Christianity against the corruptions of those who had been influenced by rationalists, atheists, and so on.

It was the case, after all, that "Revivals of religion and revivals of the slave-trade go hand in hand together."

The prominent presence of non-traditional Christians and even non-Christians, such as this Unitarian Universalist, in the anti-slavery coalition was regularly cited as evidence that abolitionism couldn't really be Christian.

As one Confederate famously argued, the armed defense of slavery was a defense against the evils of revolutionary atheism:

For 'Liberty Equality, Fraternity,' we have deliberately substituted Slavery, Subordination and Government. Those social and political problems which rack and torture modern society we have undertaken to solve for ourselves, in our own way, and upon our own principles. That among equals equality is right;' among those who are naturally unequal, equality is chaos; that there are slave races born to serve, master races born to govern. Such are the fundamental principles which we inherit from the ancient world, which we lifted up in the face of perverse generation that has forgotten the wisdom of its fathers: by those principles we live and in their defence we have shown ourselves ready to die. Reverently we feel that our Confederacy is a God sent missionary to the nations, with great truths to preach.

It's exactly in this context that Frederick Douglass argued that there were two types of Christianity in America, the severity of the split between them being such that, as historian Mark Noll argues, the American Civil War actually began within the internal divisions of American Christianity.

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Could charity replace welfare?

Here's something you can learn in the line at the welfare office in Clayton County, Ga.: People generally don't ask for help until they really need help. Until the heat is shut off, or the rent is very late, or there's no more food. Until there are no more ketchup packets and saltine crackers in the cupboard. Until their children are very hungry.

And by then it's too late.

As a reporter for several years on the south side of metro Atlanta, I spent some time exploring the area's social services, and the public responses to the problem of poverty. One of the things I found was this specific bureaucratic problem of lag time between the application for and approval of government assistance. The approval process takes time. Time that those who ask for help don't have.

No one applies for help they need in 30 days.

What happens is this: They meet the case worker. They fill out the paperwork. They provide information and sign at the x, and they tell the caseworker what their situation is. Then, at some point, awkwardly, normally, they clear their throat and say, "so ...."

"So ... how soon could this ...?"

And then the government worker says, "When is the last time you ate?" Or, "Do you have food to feed your kids tonight?"

And they don't. They never do: that's why they're asking for help.

Then the case workers lead the people down the hall to what was a break room, but is now a food bank. The get out boxes and bags and they fill them with good things to eat. They send them home with soup and bread, potatoes and canned vegetables and mac & cheese. There is no application process for this. You only have to go and wait in line, meet with the case worker, say that you're hungry and don't know how you'll feed your kids, and you will get food. While you wait for the government to do something, you will be fed. And it's privately funded food.

The food bank in the welfare office in Clayton County, Ga. is actually a private charity. The food isn't paid for by government of any level, but actually is put there by a dozen businesses and services organizations, each of which commit to stocking the food bank for one month a year. It's given away by the social workers who work for the government, but provided by private charity.

This is the kind of charity that many conservatives, particularly Christians, believe is better than welfare programs and should replace welfare programs.

There are very strong teachings in the New Testament about charity and caring for the poor, and those Christians who object to public assistance programs that help the poor don't just ignore those teaching, despite what some critics say. They believe it's very important to assist those who need assistance, but also that how that's done is critical. They argue, on both practical and theoretical grounds, that the state should not be the entity doing this work that needs to be done. Charity in itself is good, but the government ruins that, and makes things worse.

I wonder, though, practically speaking, if charity could replace welfare.

Purely as a pragmatic issue, would it be possible? Could private charities move beyond assistance, beyond helping at the points where the system of government assistance is breaking down, replacing government with benevolent associations as religious conservatives say would be preferable. If given the chance, could and would people of good will take care of the poor voluntarily, giving enough money to private organizations to functionally replace the social safety nets now in place?

I'm not sure they could.

Currently, in Georgia, to take the example I know best, private charities don't seem robust enough to replace welfare programs. They are, for the most part, themselves in perpetual financial crisis, struggling to raise enough funds to do what they currently do, which is is only substitutionary, filling in when government-funded social programs fail to meet immediate needs. Where welfare systems are being dismantled, and assistance has been drastically cut or made dramatically harder to get, charities are not prepared -- not funded or staffed or supported in a way that they could be prepared -- to do more. They're already doing everything they can, and it's an ongoing struggle.

Welfare programs such as TANF, Temporary Assistance for Needy Families, have been gutted in Georgia, in recent years, and the needs of needy families have not just been simply or easily met by charitable organizations.

As Slate recently reported:

Even as unemployment has soared to 9 percent and 300,000 Georgia families now live below the poverty line—50 percent higher than in 2000, for a poverty rate that now ranks sixth in the nation—the number receiving cash benefits has all but evaporated: Only a little over 19,000 families receiving TANF remain, all but 3,400 of which were cases involving children only. That's less than 7 percent, making Georgia one of the toughest places in the nation to get welfare assistance.  

What's Georgia's secret? According to government documents, interviews with poor Georgians, and those who work with them, it's a simple one: Combine an all-Republican state government out to make a name for itself as tough on freeloaders; a state welfare commissioner so zealous about slashing the rolls that workers say she handed out Zero candy bars to emphasize her goal of zero welfare; and federal rules that, regardless of who's in the White House, give states the leeway to use the 1996 law's requirement for "work activities"—the same provision that Republicans have charged President Obama wants to unfairly water down—to slam the door in the face of the state's neediest. 

What this has created is a land that welfare forgot, where a collection of private charities struggle to fill the resulting holes. 

There are plenty of people who would argue that -- though it might be hard at the moment -- this should happen, though. Public welfare ought to be replaced by charity. Fill the safety net with holes and let private organizations take over.

Joel J. Miller recently argued at Patheos, for example, that though there might be practical reasons to commit tax monies to care for the poor, doing so is "to remedy one evil with another." He writes:

compulsion is almost always assumed in the public discussions around the topic of social justice. We jump from the moral imperative to give to the political expediency of a forced transfer, to the legal tactic of a compulsory program. That is not only a stretch, but betrays a misunderstanding of virtue.

This is also the fundamental argument made by the Acton Institute, which promotes religious arguments for the free market and argues that religious organizations, rather than the government, should provide for the poor. As the institute's founder, the Rev. Robert A. Sirico, has argued:

What is [morally] required of us as individuals may or may not translate into a civic policy priority. In the case of the welfare state, it is possible to argue that it does great good (though I would dispute that). Whether it does or does not, however, a government program effects nothing toward fulfilling the Gospel requirement that we give of our own time and income toward assisting the poor.

[....] I cannot see how this method of redistributing wealth has anything to do with the Gospel. Jesus never called on public authority to enact welfare programs. He never demanded that his followers form a political movement to tax and spend. Nor did he say that the property of the rich must always be forcibly expropriated. He called for a change in the human heart, not a change in legislation. There is a massive difference.

Both Miller and Sirico hold that, on principle, government programs to help the poor are wrong, even immoral. But they would not argue that the only moral option is for the poor to remain poor, to be destitute and go hungry. Rather, they advocate that charity replace welfare. They want a program like the privately funded food bank in Clayton County that's currently housed in and administered by the government officials to replace the government systems of assistance, rather than merely serving to supplement the government programs.

Whether or not one agrees with arguments about the morality of public assistance, the practical aspects of private charity seem like they should be matters of fact. Many, I suspect, would be happy to disregard the ideological questions of preferred public policy if it could be demonstrated that the poor would be adequately cared for by private charities. A solution is a solution, after all.

Georgians themselves are quite generous, too. They're good people and willing to give. If charity could work to replace welfare, it should work in Georgia, which ranks eighth in the nation in terms of giving. In 2011, Georgians give about $4.8 billion to charity. This is a combination of private giving, corporate giving, foundations, and bequests. Typical households gave about 6.2 percent of their income, even as the economy was still struggling, unemployment rates remained high and all the rest.

Is that enough, though, to take care of the state's poor?

According to Slate, there are about 300,000 Georgian families living below the poverty line. For a family of four, that means an income of less than $23,000 per year.

For that family of four, groceries would cost about $520 a month, according to the estimates of the USDA. That's the "thrifty plan,"  not an excess of groceries. Keeping to that minimum, the cost of groceries would add up to an annual cost of about $6,240, nearly a quarter of family's income if they were exactly at poverty level.

If the family lives in the Atlanta area, a crowded one bedroom apartment should cost them about $757 per month, according to HUD estimates of fair market rent. If they live in the cheapest place in the state, Jenkins County, where 22 percent of families live below the poverty line and there are fewer jobs, monthly rent on a one bedroom apartment will cost them a little more than $400 per month. If the family of four that lives exactly at the poverty line is in Jenkins County, then rent will eat up a fifth of their income. If the family is in Atlanta, where there are more economic opportunities, housing will take more than half of their annual income.

Georgians -- including these very poor Georgians -- are very generous, though. There's more than $4 billion being given to charity every year. So could it be possible to help those living below the poverty line with private charity?

Some back-of-the-envelope math: To give each of the 300,000 families living at or below the poverty line the money they need for groceries -- just covering the cost of food to help them out -- assuming poor families average out to families of four who need $520 per month for groceries, this would cost about $156 million per month.

That's $1.87 billion per year.

Perhaps it could be done for less than that, but this is not counting administration costs or distribution costs, buildings to house food banks or anything like that. This is imagining a scenario where poor families are just given credit to buy food for themselves, and the process of doing that is completely cost free: $1.87 billion.

Do the math on housing, and it works out pretty much the same. To pay the rent for 300,000 families living at or below the poverty line, or even just offset the cost of housing, would be very expensive. If you figure an average stipend of $500 per month for housing, that's a monthly bill of $150 million. Annually, helping the poor pay their rents in this way would cost about $1.8 billion.

Which is still significantly less than the government currently spends on welfare in a given year.

In 2012, state and local governments spent $5.2 billion on welfare in Georgia, more than all private giving combined. If every existing penny of charity in the state were to go to fund existing programs -- with donors just replacing tax payers as the source of funding -- there'd be a $400 million shortfall.

Disregarding the current welfare programs, though, and just focusing on the possibility of private charity for basic, practical expenses to help the state's poor, covering grocery costs, supplementing rent on cheap apartments, and you're still talking about $1.8, $1.87 billon.

This be a major, major undertaking for those who wanted to fulfill "the Gospel requirement that we give of our own time and income toward assisting the poor," as Siricio put it. Either of these charitable efforts to replace welfare would require about a third of what Georgians currently give.

Assuming that that the money currently being given is going to good things -- a fair assumption, I think -- then private giving would have to increase from $4.8 billion to, say, $6.66 billion.

On the one hand, that's not impossible to imagine. Many churches ask their members to give 10 percent of what they earn to charity, and if Georgians all did that, giving would increase by nearly 4 percent.  If individuals, corporations, foundations, bequests all increased giving by three or four percent, it would be possible to pay for the groceries of all of Georgia's poor, or give them a significant offset in the cost of a one bedroom apartment.

Not both, though. And, seriously, $1.8 billion is a lot of money.

That's roughly the amount the Salvation Army was given in 2010 -- nation wide. The Salvation Army has a massive fund raising operation, established institution and a long history of experience at this sort of thing. It's difficult to imagine how that success on a national scale could be equalled in increased giving in a single state. A state, remember, that already gives more than normal.

This increase in giving is even more difficult to imagine when one factors in the problem of inflation. Nationally, giving actually has gone up by about 4 percent or so a year for the last few years. That meant an increase of nearly $70 billion given away. Once you adjust for inflation, though, this increase basically disappears. When adjust for inflation, giving in 2011 is actually equal to giving in 2000, despite the fact that in the last decade the number of American families with children in poverty increased from 5 million to more than 7 million, and the number with children in deep poverty went from 2 million to more than 3 million, according to the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities.

So where would this money come from? Would it be possible to increase giving by nearly $2 billion, inflation adjusted, in the state of Georgia?

Could the private funds be found -- practically speaking -- to take care of the state's poor?

Those at the Acton Institute will argue that charity will increase if taxes are cut. If government spending goes away, as it is in Georgia, and if people get to take home more of their income, as they do in Georgia right now, then the amount given to charity will correspondingly increase. Because, as one of Acton's research fellows put it, with this withering away of the state,

Capital is ... freed up for private charity. When people keep more of their disposable income, they can be more generous instead of abdicating their responsibilities for their neighbor-in-need to politicians and bureaucrats.

The president of Acton has argued that "Private charity tends to be inversely related to growth of government welfare" and that when "budget cuts go into effect, people will reach deeper into their pockets to help those genuinely in need."

That doesn't seem to be true, though. Giving doesn't correspond to tax rates, but to economic growth. When recessions hit, giving declines, and when the economy improves, giving does too. In recent history, giving increased a good bit during the late '90s, corresponding pretty directly to the boom years of the dot-com bubble. The Bush tax cuts, by comparison, which went into effect in 2001, by comparison, saw no corresponding increase in giving. According to Giving USA, rates of charity pretty consistently correspond to the Gross Domestic Product, more than any other economic indicator, fluctuating between 1.6 and 2.3 percent of the GDP between 1971 and 2011. This means that, generally speaking, charity doesn't increase when there's increased need, in the way that government spending might, but rather seems to be another kind of luxury spending that people, in aggregate, spend when they have.

Given the reality of actual giving, it's hard to see how charity could replace welfare, practically speaking. Even if it the case that charity is morally superior and vastly preferable to welfare programs, it doesn't seem that the money could be raised, even in generous Georgia, to replace government in taking care of the poor and establishing some kind of social safety net.

This is not in anyway a criticism of the existing charities. Those that exist do real and important work, and help the poor in many places where existing government programs fail. Throughout my time as a reporter in metro Atlanta, I was impressed by the commitment and by the successes of private charities. I was moved by their charity when I saw sick people given medical care, the homeless given shoes, and hungry children fed. That doesn't change the fact, though, that all of this was supplementary to the welfare system, and could not have replaced it. 

There are those who would like to see religion radically transform people, and change the way the poor in America are cared for. Tim Keller, for example, recently said that Christianity ought to have a direct impact on cities, giving rise to a really redemptive philanthropic spirit. He said:

Christ changes the way we use wealth and power. Our understanding of work must reflect what Robert Bellah (from his book, Habits of the Heart) describes as a contribution to the common good. Along this line, I'd express a desire to populate the city with people who embody this vision. I'd want to see an explosion of philanthropy, in which we don't spend money on ourselves, but instead cooperate with others who want to make the city a desirable place to live. Much like Wilberforce did in the early part of 19th-century England, we would pursue healing and redemption.

It seems an admirable goal. As it stands, though, Georgia has some of the most generous cities in America, and the private charity there is not even close to replacing welfare.

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Beer and church

There's something about beer and church.

The combination seems incongruous, especially when the church in question is a conservative one, evangelical, the sort of church that might well talk about sin, might well put an emphasis on condemning some individual behavior such as drinking as sin. It seems like it must be something new, combining beer and church. It's become something of a regular feature in major newspapers, the gosh-gee story of a church in a bar.

In the New York Times, for example, over the New Years holiday, there was a piece on Steve Gilbertson, 52, who "preaches under a mesquite tree, in the shadow of a saloon best known for the quality of its country-western bands and the fervor of its regulars’ allegiance to the Green Bay Packers."

There, "Mr. Gilbertson’s Sunday services end just as the saloon opens at 10 a.m. He said he does not judge or mind if his congregants stick around for a drink, as some of them might do."

Is it really that strange, though? The logic of the church in the bar isn't a 20th century invention; it's as old as evangelicalism.

Last summer, the Associated Press ran a similarly toned piece on a church in Pensacola, Florida. The lead:

On a balmy Sunday morning at the Flora-Bama Lounge, Package and Oyster Bar, barkeeps set up their stations as churchgoers filtered in under a Jack Daniels banner.  

The iconic bar, which sits on the Florida and Alabama state line, is famous for its annual mullet-tossing contest — patrons gather on the beach and throw dead fish from Alabama into Florida.  

Bikini contests, bar brawls and drink specials are the day-to-day business of the beach bar that calls itself "America's last roadhouse."  

But for one hour every Sunday, the Flora-Bama is home to about 450 regular congregants of Worship at the Water, an outreach service of the Perdido Bay United Methodist Church.

Going back a little further, the Boston Globe had a piece in 2011 about a church in a bar in the Fenway Park area, where the double irony was that the bar was named Church. From that story:

The pastor of Fenway Church, 28-year-old David W. Hill, a Fenway resident, acknowledged the oddity of worshiping in a bar called Church. 

'When we started the church we were hoping for a nontraditional place. We hadn’t really realized that a club could be an option,' Hill said. 'But when we saw that Church had just opened up, we thought, Whoa, that’s kind of cool. It really fits with our whole nontraditional-type theme that people could come and experience Jesus in a bar.'

Whether it seems strange or not, though, however "non-traditional" it appears, there's actually a long history of this.

Quakers, who were opposed to the institutionalization of religion in a way many contemporary American evangelicals might find familiar, have met in taverns. In London in the 1600s, a Quaker meeting was held in a tavern called the Bull and Mouth. In the 1700s in America, Quakers occasionally held services in taverns as part of the process of reaching out to sympathetic non-Quakers. In his journals, the itinerant preacher John Woolman recounts holding such a meeting in a tavern in New Brunswick, New Jersey. He writes: "The room was full and the people were quiet."

The logic of this -- of churches in bars -- is actually quite familiar to American evangelicals. It's in the genetic make-up of American evangelicalism. The explanations one might find today are the same as those offered by John Wesley, when he talked about why he preached outside of churches.

During the revivals of the eighteenth century, Wesley was famous for preaching in the open air. As he explained it, that was,

not out of choice, but necessity; but I have since seen abundant reason to adore the wise provi­ dence of God herein, making a way for myriads (sic) of people who never troubled any church, nor were likely to do so, to hear that word which they soon found to be the power of God unto salvation.

While the founder of Methodism didn't prefer preaching out of doors, and suggested that ministers preach inside when they could, he also firmly believed that the really important thing was reaching people. The instructions Wesley gave to Methodist ministers emphasized this above all:

You have nothing to do but save souls. Therefore spend and be spent in this work; go always, not only to those who want you, but to those who [need] you most.

Despite what one reads in the papers, non-traditional meeting place are actually a deep part of the evangelical tradition. It comes out of the core logic of evangelicalism. 

Though it's true that there's a long history of evangelical opposition to alcohol, it's also the case that evangelicals believe -- most essentially -- that people should have an intimate and personal relationship with Jesus. The kind of relationship that might mean having a beer with the savior, as country music singer Thomas Rhett imagined in his song, "If I Could Have a Beer with Jesus":

Churches in bars might seem strange, and the apparent weirdness makes for a colorful bit of reporting, but they're really not, given the history of evangelicalism.

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Beyond theodicy, in the days after Sandy Hook

There are reasons to highlight the horrible theodicies offered by the likes of Mike Huckabee and Bryan Fischer, when a tragedy happens like the one that happened in Connecticut last week. These men lead, and aspire to lead, and hold positions of privilege. Publicizing their comments serves to marginalize them. Everyone, even those who might otherwise find these men reasonable and believable, gets a chance to be horrified, and side with those who are suffering rather than the ideologues' ghastly ideologies. Which is what happened.

Their comments, though, shouldn't be taken for a fair representation of the bulk of those Christians, or even evangelicals, or even conservative evangelicals who listen to the likes of Huckabee and Fischer. These theodicies aren't widely embraced. Even where they are, in theory, accepted, most recoil from that kind of talk when it would actually be applicable, when they're actually a tragedy to be explained.

The more common response, the one you would have heard in most evangelical churches in America last Sunday, was more likely of the character of Ross Douthat's recent column. Evangelicals, like the Catholic columnist for the New York Times, for the most part understand God to be on the side of the suffering, and not the ultimate cause of violence. While that may, in terms of theology, leave violence unexplained, and leave unanswered the very real question of there could be such violence and also exist a totally good and totally powerful God, it nevertheless allows the believers to respond with empathy, and to understand God to respond that way too.

As Douthat wrote:

the only thing that my religious tradition has to offer to the bereaved of Newtown today — besides an appropriately respectful witness to their awful sorrow — is a version of that story, and the realism about suffering that it contains. 

That realism may be hard to see at Christmastime, when the sentimental side of faith owns the cultural stage. But the Christmas story isn’t just the manger and the shepherds and the baby Jesus, meek and mild. 

The rage of Herod is there as well, and the slaughtered innocents of Bethlehem, and the myrrh that prepares bodies for the grave. The cross looms behind the stable — the shadow of violence, agony and death.

Others echoed this. James K.A. Smith, himself a Calvinist, responded to the tragedy of Sandy Hook Elementary by arguing against a Christian theodicy:

Let's not pretend we have an answer to the question, "Why?" We can only lament in that space between the Resurrection and kingdom come.
— James K.A. Smith (@james_ka_smith) December 16, 2012

Eric Metaxas, the author of the Dietrich Bonhoeffer biography that's been so wildly popular among evangelicals, and a radio commentator on the late Chuck Colson's radio show, Breakpoint, responded similarly, if more hamhandedly:

I grew up in Danbury, CT, next door to Newtown. What happened today is unfathomable, except perhaps as proof that we need God desperately.
— Eric Metaxas (@ericmetaxas) December 15, 2012

Where can we go in this tragedy except to the foot of the Cross, where an Innocent died to defeat Death and open the door to our true home?
— Eric Metaxas (@ericmetaxas) December 16, 2012

There are plenty of reasons to talk about and criticize the kind of "Christian answer" being offered by Huckabee, Fischer, and those like them, but an actual consideration of how conservative Christians theologize a response to evil in 21st century America would do better to look at these other sorts of statements. If theodicy's going to be criticized, it should be this theodicy.

And it can be criticized.

I, for one, wonder about where such statements of God's "understanding" leave you. Empathy can also mean paralysis. These sorts of statements, while not attributing the violence to a divine cause and asking people to simply submit, don't seem to clearly offer anyone the resources to respond to such a situation. They're compatible, at least, with a kind of nihilism, surrendering to and accepting of such irrationality and violence as being just the way things are. It's possible to view the idea that "God understands" as saying, in some sense, that hope for something different, something better, is futile.

Despair, God knows, has been common enough response this last week. Maybe aestheticized and spiritualized despair, despair with God, is the best we can hope for, given everything.

I know, though, that Christian theology does have resources within it to suggest that something can be done, beyond just mourning. The gospel reading assigned for the third Sunday in Advent -- last Sunday -- begins, for example, with the question, "What should we do?"

There is an answer given.

It seems to me to be different than talk about "our true home."

Still, the only place to start, the only acceptably human place to start, with any theological response dead children, has to be in mourning. Has to be in solidarity with the suffering. Unlike those who rush to God's defense, and in doing make claims for the divine rationality of such irrationality, the Godly sense of such violence, most of the ministers wrestling with how to respond to the sort of overwhelming despair that comes with such tragedies did try to start with empathy, whether that was enough or not.

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Mark Driscoll on pot: sloppy, lazy, deeply unserious

Full disclosure: I am a public transportation user.

This makes it difficult to achieve or maintain the necessary distance to dispassionately review Mark Driscoll's new e-book, Puff or Pass? Should Christians Smoke Pot or Not. Because, it turns out, Driscoll's big argument opposing the recreational use of marijuana is the same as his argument against taking the train. Bus riders and pot smokers turn out, in Driscoll's understanding, to have the same problem. His message to both sets of "users" is identical: grow up.

I am not making this up, and I'm not stretching to make this argument.

Driscoll, "one of the world's most downloaded and quoted pastors," according to his church's website, explicitly makes this comparison.

He writes that the question of marijuana use comes up in his ministry because he works with "a high (pun intended) percentage of single young guys living typical, irresponsible urban lives." The real problem, the root problem of the issue of marijuana use, is that irresponsibility and immaturity: marijuana is just another example of the spiritual epidemic of boys who won't grow up, according to Driscoll. So even though smoking a joint isn't illegal anymore in Washington State, where Driscoll ministers, and even if marijuana isn't specifically prohibited by his church and maybe won't bring down church discipline, it's wrong because it's another way people avoid maturity.

Driscoll writes:

[...] as a pastor I have noticed that people tend to stop maturing when they start self medicating. Everyone has very tough seasons in life, but by persevering through them we have an opportunity to mature and grow as people. Those who self-medicate with drugs and/or alcohol (as well as other things) often thwart maturity as they escape the tough seasons of life rather than face them. 

[...] when a man acts like a boy, that’s a real problem. A recent article even noted that young men are now less likely than ever to own a car, as taking public transportation allows them to use their smartphone more hours every day playing video games and downloading porn. The last thing these guys need is to get high, be less motivated, and less productive; instead, they need to "act like men, [and] be strong" (1 Cor. 16:13).

The article that Driscoll cites about public transportation users doesn't say anything like he says it says. He links an Atlantic Monthly piece entitled "Why are Young People Ditching Cars for iPhones?" The author writes that economic changes and changes in consumer culture explain the 11 point drop in young people's car purchases between 1985 and 2012. There's nothing in there -- at all -- about a somehow new age of irresponsibility, and not even a single mention of publicaly viewed porn or lives devoted to video games.

I don't know if Driscoll's just making stuff up or what.

I can tell you what people do on buses and trains, though. I commute to work on a train and spend, some semesters, up to eight hours a week on public transportations. I made the decision to take public transportation rather than buy a car for financial reasons, and also to make better use of my time. I read, grade papers and prep classes on the train. I have also slept on the train, had breakfast on the train, and occasionally played computer games on the train. The other commuters I've seen are like me: they read, write e-mails, listen to music, do homework, talk to people, watch TV, and sometimes just stare off into space. Apparently, to Driscoll, this looks like a public health crisis of immaturity. To me it looks like people doing stuff. Maybe Driscoll looks at commuter traffic and sees manliness: I see waste and frustrating boredom.

If car culture encourages adult behavior and car ownership correlates to personal responsibility, I'm sure I don't know how. 

But this is the thing about this little digital booklet. Supposedly the value upheld and advocated is maturity. On a certain level, that's what's happening. However, this work is also itself enormously lazy, and, I think it can be argued, encourages and fosters immaturity.

This is a slight book, free to download from The Resurgence, which offers resources to train and equip people in Driscoll and Mars Hill's brand of evangelical Reformed theology. It's only 36 pages, but with lots of white space, oversized fonts, and half an excess of front matter, it's more like 15.

And some of that is filler.

Part one of Puff or Pass? is labeled "Statistics." Driscoll -- with the help of a research group -- uses this section to recap two Pew Research Center studies about marijuana, both of which are freely available online (here and here). The reports have to do with public support for legalization, and also mention the percentage of people who say they've tried marijuana. Driscoll simply quotes the studies. There's no interpretation, no explanation, no arguments, and no effort -- not even a minimal one -- to try to connect those sociological facts to the question the book is supposed to answer. The relevance of this information is completely mysterious. If the statistics are supposed to be "evidence," what are they evidence of?  Driscoll just packs it in, and then moves on.

Part two of the book is dedicated to setting out a variety of opinions on the legality of marijuana and the morality of using marijuana. Driscoll calls these "Evangelical Views," but cites and quotes many who aren't evangelical leaders or even speaking specifically for or to Christians, such as an editorial by Kevin A. Sabet, who's worked on drug policy for the last three presidential administrations, and Marc Emery, an imprisoned advocate for the legalization of marijuana, who has written about Rastafarians in the magazine Cannabis Culture. The Christians cited range from Pat Robertson to Douglas Wilson, several Christianity Today writers, and official statements from a variety of churches, including the Presbyterian Church USA, the Episcopal Church, the United Methodists, and the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints ("whose members," Driscoll mentions parenthetically, "consider themselves Christian").

Driscoll doesn't actually review these various opinions, or do much in the way of evaluative work, thinking through the available arguments or ideas. He just says what they are. He classifies the opinions into options, so one can see several choice quotes for "OPTION A: Any Illegal Use of Marijuana is Immoral," "OPTION B: Recreational Use of Marijuana is Immoral; Medical Use of Marijuana is Immoral Until Science is More Conclusive," and so on.

After a certain point, with various positions being re-capped, it becomes difficult to discern what the point is. Surely American adults who are even half-way paying attention -- maybe they've been to high school, worked in a restaurant or spent time in a suburban parking lot -- can give a more or less decent account of why some people have a problem with marijuana and others don't.

But that's exactly the point.

This whole booklet seems to presuppose the reader is not a half-way intelligent, reasonably capable adult human being in 21st century America. The assumption on every page is that the reader needs the most basic information explained. Driscoll may say he wants Christians and his congregants specifically to think these issues through like adults, but he doesn't act like he's writing for adults. This booklet makes no sense unless you think the intended audience is people who are incapable of considering an issue like the morality of marijuana without a lot of handholding and rudimentary help.

Driscoll protests that this is not supposed to be a "comprehensive" or "definitive" treatment of the question, but is meant to help "Christians think through the matter in an informed way," but what he offers is more or less a cut-and-paste job, as if the intended readers couldn't Google this stuff for themselves.

This is not to say that there are no arguments made here, but they are precious few.

In at least one case, his argument is nothing more than a statement that he believes something "as a Christian." How the one thing connects to the other he doesn't bother to say.

Driscoll concludes that recreational use is always wrong but that medical use is OK "in some cases, under a doctor's supervision." The argument for medical use is just that he's not skeptical of the science that shows it's helpful in some cases. The argument against recreational use is that getting high is wrong, or anyway wanting to get high is wrong, and also there's the above-mentioned comparison to public transportation users and the injunction to "grow up!"

Driscoll notes here that he aligns with the Presbyterians, Methodists and Episcopalians on this issue. That conclusion isn't beyond the pale or in anyway crazy, but it's also not really supported as much as just stated. There's a patina of research, a gloss of "careful consideration," but in the end Driscoll isn't doing anything more than making a declaration. A press release in response to Washington State recent legalization of marijuana would have been just as informative.

The real question of this booklet is why it exists.

At several points, Driscoll notes that he used to deal with the question of marijuana by just saying that Christians shouldn't break any law they're not morally required to break by God, but that now that objection to smoking a joint is gone. The change in the state law meant the issue came up again in this new context, and this is Driscoll dealing with it.

Mostly by not dealing with it.

As best I can determine from the textual evidence, this book exists so that Driscoll and his followers won't have to think about the question of marijuana usage. This is something Driscoll can reference and people in his church can reference and be done with, without really doing any serious work. This work exists so that when someone asks if it's OK for a Christian to smoke weed sometimes, an elder won't have to answer the question, but can instead just recommend the church's website. This isn't the kind of work one produces when a topic is important or something one cares about -- it's a sloppy and lazy and deeply unserious.

The only reason it might be taken as anything else is because it has Driscoll's name on it. If that happens, it'll be a prime example of exactly the sort of facile immaturity that Driscoll is supposed to opposed to but, nevertheless, seems to be encouraging.

If this is what it means to "act like men," I'd recommend taking the train.

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Christian book covers

The Evangelical Christian Publisher's association has announced the finalists for the 2012 cover design awards. Most seem to me ... underwhelming. Some are very bad. There's certainly a clear preference for visual puns and over-literal interpretations.

I'm not an expert at these things. Perhaps the above, for example, does what it's supposed to do in a bookstore, catches attention and communicates a basic idea very succinctly. I can't help but feel, though, that such covers communicate also a deep disrespect for the intended audience.

The very worst of the nominated covers:

Presumably such dreck actually helps sales, though.

Update: A summary of the marketing research behind these designs can be found here.

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Rob Bell's internal contradiction

Rob Bell's been gone from the Michigan megachurch he founded for more than a year now. When he remembers the church, he often in a sense misremembers it, according to Kelefa Sunnah's piece in the New Yorker.

Not misremembers, exactly, but rather remembers the beginning and not the end, what was overcome instead of what was created. He talks about the energy of the potential, not the extent to which an institution is an institution is an institution. The difference between what's emphasized and what's not is the contradiction inherently internal to the megachurch project, and also to Bell himself.

Sennah writes:

"Because [Bell] vividly remembers the early days, he still sometimes talks about Mars Hill as a gritty, scrappy place: a church with no sign, no steeple, no cross, and hardly any decoration. This is all true, but Mars Hill is also a comfortable, well-run facility, with plenty of parking and age-specific child care. It was just after eight o’clock on a seasonably cold morning, and worshippers were trickling in and stamping the snow off their boots."

Both of these aspects were critical to Mars Hill's success, and also to the problems that eventually became serious. Sennah locates the tension in the two very different things a church like Mars Hill needs: a sense of creativity and ongoing discovery, but also structure, order and stability.

Another way to say this would be: the things that Bell did tended to have two opposite and yet simultaneous results. His sermon style, to take one example, brought people together who wouldn't have otherwise been brought together, and it also created new polarities, and pushed people apart.

The same is also probably true for other major evangelical leaders and their megachurches.

The question is always, it seems, of how the internal opposite forces are balanced.

Bell, on the one hand, couldn't not push. But also -- and this is missed by most of his critics and more than a few of his fans -- he couldn't allow himself or be happy with himself as a bomb-thrower and controversialist.

The contradiction, at some point, became unsustainable for Mars Hills. Or, arguably, not for Mars Hill but for Bell, who himself was internally conflicted in exactly this same way the church he created was conflicted, on the one hand wanting to be a radical and on the other unwilling to take strong stands, wanting to be a mediator and someone who builds consensus.

In Sennah's telling, the inherent contradiction within Rob Bell was expressed as a kind of crafted ambiguity ("a careful ambiguity, allowing worshipers to think that he was however evangelical" -- or however liberal -- "they wanted him to be. He wanted to make a wide range of worshipers feel comfortable.") that ultimately broke down. Either Bell himself couldn't bear the cost of keeping it up, or the balancing act of that ambiguity just became impossible, and any move would have meant a tumble.

In this postmortem, at least, the controversy over hell that marked the end, at least for now, of Bell's pastoral ministry was rather incidental to there being an end. It if wasn't that, it would have been something else. What he had, what Bell was, was unsustainable.

The internal contradiction that couldn't be kept up indefinitely.

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Old Christian radicals

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

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

The Gishes belonged to the Church of the Brethern.

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Exorcists in America

How many Christian exorcists are there in America?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

That's not impossible.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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Why do people still not know if Obama is a Christian?

Recent Pew poll results on perceptions of Romney's religion say pretty much exactly what one would expect. More people know he's Mormon than used to, but they're either OK with that or don't care. The poll found "unease with Romney’s religion has little impact on voting preferences."

The more interesting information, here, is that 51 percent of registered voters don't "Identify Obama as Christian."

This isn't because they think he's a Muslim, though. There are some who think he's Muslim, but the number that identify Obama with Islam has been pretty consistent and relatively small, upticking only slightly from 12 percent right before the 2008 election to 17 percent today. 

The big block of registered voters who don't say Obama is a Christian are not saying for sure what his faith is. They're saying they "don't know." Nearly a third say that they don't know, now, a number went as high was 41 percent in 2010. From the looks of the numbers, about 10 percent of voters have, over the course of Obama's first term, gone from thinking he's a Christian to not knowing if he's a Christian to thinking he's a Christian again -- all without ever saying he's Muslim.

It's possible to read this "don't know" as simply the safe version of saying he's Muslim. Some Republican officials have taken this stance of allowing doubt and encouraging distrust without actually saying anything directly. Like, "he says he's a Christian ... (but I don't know)," etc.

There's another way to read this question about Obama's Christianity, though, which has nothing to do with rumors he's a secret Muslim.

It's possible 31 percent of registered voters don't know if Obama's a Christian because they don't know if liberal Christianity is really Christianity.


Consider: a year ago there was an intra-evangelical fight about the doctrine of eternal damnation, after megachurch minister Rob Bell wrote a book questioning some aspects of that idea. The terms of the fight were, to a large extent, could one still be considered a Christian if one did not believe in hell? This is not an exaggeration. Though it was portrayed as a conflict over this doctrine, it was actually about who gets to count as Christian. So John MacArthur wrote, e.g., "Is Rob Bell truly a Christian, or is he one of those dangerous deceivers Scripture warns us about repeatedly (Acts 20:29; 2 Corinthians 11:13-15; Colossians 2:8; 2 Peter 2:1; etc.)? It's a fair—and necessary—question." Kevin DeYoung, who started the extensive attack on Bell, wrote that "At the very heart of this controversy ... is that we really do have two different Gods" and "Bell’s vision of heaven and hell doesn’t work because his vision of God is false."

For people who take this position that Christianity is only Christianity if it includes a strong vision of eternal damnation, Obama's not going to count as Christian.

In one of his more extensive statements on his faith, for example, the then-Illinois state senator said,

"I find it hard to believe that my God would consign four-fifths of the world to hell. 
I can’t imagine that my God would allow some little Hindu kid in India who never interacts with the Christian faith to somehow burn for all eternity.
 That’s just not part of my religious makeup."

DeYoung, and those like him, would not likely conclude from the above that the president is a Muslim, but they wouldn't say he's a Christian, either. Not a "real" Christian, anyway.

Thus: "don't know."

It's a kind of yes and no answer, as in yes he's a Christian in the sense he identifies as such, but no, he's not really a Christian, because he embraces a "phony theology ... not a theology based on Bible." The "yes" is about a descriptivist account of Christianity, which allows that people are as they say they are, and the "no" is a prescriptivist account, which holds there's an essential definition of Christianity, and someone can say they're Christian without meeting the objective theological standards of being Christian.

It's possible that nearly a third of the country's registered voters are just confused and have been tricked by conservative commentators into suspecting the president of the United States is other than what he claims to be. A more reasonable explain, though, it seems to me, is that this 31 percent recognizes Obama is, as he says he is, a liberal Christian, but they don't know that that Christianity is really Christianity.

For them, liberal Christianity is in a confusing neither/nor space that's kind of hard to name, especially when going back and forth between descriptivist and prescriptivist definitions of "Christian," and that's exactly the gray area where Obama and his faith fall.

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Incarnation, in the context of demon possession

A fascinating thing about demonology and explanations of exorcisms is the way theology -- sometimes very abstract theology -- is re-cast in very different terms.
 
So, for example, an anonymous Catholic priest from the Midwest who participates in about three exorcisms a day talked to the Catholic News Agency about the incarnation, as thought about in the context of demon possession. CNA reports:

"The early Church Fathers, including St. Jerome and St. Augustine, speculated that these angels rebelled 'because of the revelation to them of God’s plan of incarnation' and their 'repulsion at the notion that God, who is pure spirit and infinite, should become a man.'

For this reason, the priest observed, they have a 'fascination with physicality' and 'making people suffer.'

'So once the rite begins, normally [the demon] starts to manifest himself in the suffering person different ways - violence, changing of the face, changing of the voice [so it] is different,' he said."

This means, according to the priest, 1) the demon is, from the demon's perspective, slumming; 2) the suffering person is suffering because of the incarnation; 3) suffering is inextricably linked to redemption.

This isn't so different than traditional Catholic theology of incarnation. But when those doctrines are illustrated with the image of a 13-year-old boy who falls down and starts growling in response to a priest's prayer, the context for the meaning of these ideas changes, and some aspects are more notable that they would be otherwise.

The idea that suffering is related to redemption, specifically, looks a lot different in this context:

"'These suffering people are becoming saints (by) the offering of their sacrifices' which God then receives and 'blesses large parts of the Church around the world.'

'When you remind the Devil of that it makes him furious,' because he knows he is losing and hence 'he wants to get what he can, while he can. If he can't win these peoples' souls, he wants to at least make their lives miserable.'"

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