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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Happy birthday Billy Graham

Billy Graham turns 94 today.

One of the odder moments of Graham's very public career -- though there are many, and many more than one would expect given Graham's image -- from a 1969 interview with William F. Buckley:

"I think that many people have been thrown off by the terrible sufferings and the overwhelming problems that have been created in our generation. But this is precisely a fulfillment of what the Bible itself teaches. Because the Bible teaches that our problems originate from the fact that man, since the Garden of Eden, has been in rebellion against God. Now I personally hold the view that there are beings on other planets and that, I believe, this is the only planet in rebellion against God."

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The odd non-relation of the economy & religious construction

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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