'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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Teaching the history of American atheism

There are more than a few resources available to those who would teach on atheism, so long as they conceive of atheism in philosophical terms. There are anthologies, and college course syllabi available online, and a more-or-less established sense of what would be included in such a course.

For those interested in teaching on the history of atheism, this isn't the case.

Personally, I became interested in atheism as a historical phenomena when thinking about how to explain the relationship between the New Atheists and the cultural changes at the turn of the century -- the terrorist attacks of 2001, the election of George W. Bush, and the rise of blogging in particular. While the arguments being advanced by New Atheists were, from the most part, not directly speaking to their political and cultural context, those things seemed relevant nonetheless. They're relevant not necessarily in terms of evaluating the arguments being made, but in terms of understanding why the arguments were what they were, and why they were being made in the ways they were. It seemed, further, that in the atheism debates that sprang up in the first part of the 21st century, atheism was consistently being treated as one thing, a timeless and unchanging philosophy. But when one looks at actually existing atheism, there are always multiple movements and counter-movements and many contested claims about coextensive commitments that come along with atheism.

Atheism, that is to say, is always, in history, atheisms. In the plural, they are, I find, more complex, more fraught, and more alive than they're generally made to seem in popular, public conversations.

Thinking about atheism ahistorically means leaving out a lot of interesting and arguably important aspects of the atheisms that people hold to and live their lives with.

Approaching the subject as history, on the other hand, allows one to focus on at least two important issues. One, what cultural conditions contributed to and determined the shape and tenor of various atheist movements, and two, what effect those movements had and have on the culture. Approaching atheism historically can mean (for example) allowing for the space necessary to think about how different political environments and philosophies were hospitable to different movements of atheists at different times -- why, for example, Republicans in the Gilded Age gladly counted Robert Ingersoll as one of their own, while in the first decades of the 20th century atheists were associated and affiliated with the more radical strains of the politics of the left.

As far as I can tell, the only readily available historical works on atheism tend towards hagiography, or are designed to be dismissive, so that "history" means either "model for moral instruction" or "refutation." Such approaches aren't great, academically. While they may be useful for arguing for atheism or against atheism, they're not helpful in teaching about atheism, which is what I want to do.

I am trying to teach the history of American atheism(s) this semester. I've had to create my own canon, to do that, with a bit of very helpful advice. With the thought that there may be others interested in teaching such a course, or anyway, general interest in approaching atheism as aspect of American history, I offer my course schedule reading list here, along with some explanatory notes.

In selecting the assigned readings, I kept two principals in mind: One, representitiveness; Two, accessibility.

It quickly became evident that it would not be possible to be comprehensive, given limitations of a semester. But I wanted readings that would adequately represent the various movements of atheism in American history, give students a vairly complete overview, and I wanted to have selections that would sufficiently present the particular thinkers and their arguments. Also I wanted readings that would not give my students -- mostly in their first years of university, coming from a wide variety of educational backgrounds, from a number of different disciplines -- too much trouble. Plus I had to be able to get ahold of the given readings and make them available to the students. With those limitations and goals, here's what I came up with:

15 April

Introduction; syllabus; definitions; review of classic arguments for the existence of God

22 April

Thomas Paine (1737-1809)

Selections from Age of Reason

Joel Barlow (1754-1812)

Selections from Joel Barlow: American Citizen in a Revolutionary World, by Richard Buel, Jr.

29 April

Robert Ingersoll (1833-1899)

"Centennial Oration"; "Why I am an Agnostic"; selections from The Great Agnostic, by Susan Jacoby

Elizabeth Candy Stanton (1815-1902)

Selections from A Woman's Bible

6 May

Charles Chilton Moore (1837-1906)

Selections from Kentucky's Most Hated Man, by John Sparks

Blue Grass Blade

Selections from Letter from an Atheist Nation, ed. Thomas Lawson

13 May

William Graham Sumner (1840-1910)

"Religion and the Mores"; "That it is Not Wicked to be Rich; Nay, Even That it is Not Wicked to be Richer Than One's Neighbor"; "The Shifting of Responsiblity"; "Sketch of William Graham Sumner," by Albert Galloway Keller; "God and Man at Yale (in 1880)" by George Marsden

20 May

Max Eastman (1883-1969)

"The Religion of Patriotism"

Mike Gold (1894-1967)

"The Jesus-Thinkers"

27 May

H.L. Menken (1880-1956)

Selections from Damn! A Book of Calumny; Scopes trial reporting

3 June: NO CLASS 

10 June 

Humanist Manifestoes (1933; 1973)

17 June

Richard Wright (1908-1960)

Selections from Black Boy

James Baldwin (1924-1987)

Selections from Go Tell it on a Mountain

24 June

Ayn Rand (1905-1982)

Selections from Atlas Shrugged; Playboy Interview 1964

1 July

Madalyn Murray O’Hair (1919-1995)

Playboy Interview 1965, "The Murder of the Madalyn Murray O'Hair: America's Most Hated Woman," by Lona Manning

8 July

William Hamilton (1924-2012)

"The New Essence of Christianity"

Thomas J.J. Altizer (1927- )

"A Wager"

Make-up class:

Richard Feynman (1918-1988)

"The Relation of Science and Religion"; "Cargo Cult Science"

Carl Sagan (1934-1996)

"Pale Blue Dot"; selections from "The Varieties of Scientific Experience"

15 July

Daniel Dennett (1942- )

"The Bright Stuff"; "Atheism and Evolution"; "The Evolution of Misbelief"

22 July

Chris Stedman (1987- )

Selections from Faitheist

Conclusion; wrap-up 

A few thoughts:
1. It would be very easy to double the number of readings. There are lots and lots of people who are not here and could be here, though hopefully the above gives a good overview even though it's not comprehensive.
2. There were a number of people who I ended up leaving out because their work is limited mainly to criticizing instantiations of Chrisitanity, and they don't generally go beyond that. Examples range from 19th century abolitionists to 21st century media figures. I gave preference to works where epistemological and metaphysical claims are made.
3. If this could be expanded, it would be worth looking at those who were not atheists per se but attempted to establish secular alternatives to traditional religions, such as Felix Addler and John Muir. Such movements will be referenced in discussions of readings that are included, but there are limits on time that forced me to make some tough decisions.
4. With a few noted exceptions, fictional works on atheism were not included. While there would ideally be space for Mark Twain, Ambrose Bierce, Robert Heinlein, Isaac Asimov, Kurt Vonnegut, etc., etc., there was a problem of accessibility. In some cases, non fiction versions of the author's arguments are easier to teach. In others, the issue of excerpting a short enough portion of text for a single undergrad class was very problematic. Additionally, teaching fiction is different than teaching argumentative essays, and switching back and forth too much presents a number of challenges.
5. There are only a few secondary texts, here, mostly in the first month of class. The secondary texts I've found tend to be very uneven. The hope, though, is that these texts will demonstrate to the students how one can take a primary text and situate it historically and read it in historical context, which the class will then do with the later texts.
6. Class time will be given to a combination of history lectures and group discussions explicating the assigned readings.

This is obviously a work in progress, but, I hope, a promising one.

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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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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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The obsession with the obsession with the end of the world

The first episode of the reality TV show Doomsday Preppers was watched by 1.29 million people. It is the most-watched show in National Geographic's history. By the time the fourth episode of the second season aired last month, ratings had suffered a little, but still there were more than 700,000 viewers.

It's very unlikely that all those 700,000 viewers were themselves interested in ways to prepare for the end of the world. It seems unlikely even that such a show would make sense, economically, if it catered only to those sympathetic to the ideas of the subjects of the show. And really, the people featured in this show are presented as strange, as freaks, as laughable.

To quote the New York Times review:

Watch [...] for a short while and, unless you’re a prepper yourself, you might be moderately amused at the absurd excess on display and at what an easy target the prepper worldview is for ridicule.

It may be the case that there's a "burgeoning 'prepper' movement," as USA Today claims, but there's little actual evidence of that. Such people do clearly exist, but that's not a new thing. And that's not why such a show exists.

If you want to explain the reason such a show as this exists, you have to look not only at the existence of the people featured in the show, asking why there are so many people dedicating their lives to preparing for the end of the world, but also at the audience.

Why are there so many people so fascinated by people so obsessed by the end of the world?

This is true, too, with the slate of apocalyptic predictions all due tomorrow, the Mayan calendar and the black hole at the center of the galaxy and the hidden planet set to collide with earth. The number of people who take such theories seriously is vanishingly miniscule. The number of people who take seriously the people who take such theories seriously, however, is quite sizable. How do we explain that?

I'm very skeptical, personally, about reports of how widely such apocalyptic theories are believed. A lot of the accounts of belief seem to be very vague or very naive about what it means to believe, and there's also a strong, strong tendency towards credulity when it comes to other people's credulity. However, even if we accept the phenomenon of apocalyptic beliefs without any skepticism, that wouldn't explain the cultural phenomena of obsession with the end of the world. Because that obsession, in American culture at this moment, is not just and not even most basically obsession with the end of the world, but obsession with obsession about the end.

Beyond the matter of "true believers," there's a cultural phenomenon right now of avid interest in true believers. There's a market, here, and it's booming.

It's not enough to just explain the people featured on Doomsday Preppers, the people out there who aren't joking about Nibiru, the people who are violent in their belief in the possibility of zombie apocalypse. If we want to understand this, we can't just look at the obsessed on the TV screen. We have to also look at us looking at the TV screen.

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Thinking about religious books as commodities

Matt Hedstrom, American Studies professor at the University of Virginia and author of the recently released The Rise of Liberal Religion: Book Culture and American Spirituality in the Twentieth Century, talking about his book on Virginia public radio.

Hedstrom starts with a brief, of sorts, for the book markets and book cultures, and why that study is important in the study of religion:

"Religions also always take on the characteristics of their moment, of their surrounding culture. When you think about the United States in the 20th century, and still in the 21st century, I think the most powerful cultural forces we've got are media and the consumer marketplace. We shape our identities so much through what we consume and how we choose to consume all kinds of commodities, and how we consume media in particular. And, for a lot of Americans, over the course of the the 20th century, the most culturally significant commodity that they bought were books."

Thinking about books as commodities and about how faith as currently, culturally understood, is constructed in the context of such market interactions between consumers and commodities has been one of the major developments of my thinking in my dissertation work. Hearing Hedstrom talk at the Religion and the Marketplace conference in Heidelberg, in Oct. 2011, spurred me on in this.

His book, I think, will be a good addition to the growing body of work on religious book cultures.

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A teaching career

 

The professor, as imagined in children's lit: a tumblr.

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Ritual, money, & the death of a pet

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

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

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

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



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

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

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

As the reporter writes,

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

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

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

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

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'We gospel rappin'

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

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

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

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

There's certainly a truth to that.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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Monologue at a Boston bookstore

Did you get my text?
My phone is about to die.
I thought I sent it to you, but it looked like it went to somebody else.
John Winthrop.
John Winthrop.
JOHN. WIN. THRuuuP.
Remember him?
From the Winthrops.
Winthrops.
You read that 38,000 page series on the Winthrops.
Well, I'm glad I didn't send you the text, then.
You would have been like, 'what is this?'
Hello?
Hello.

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