The faiths of Congress

From the Pew Forum on Religion and Public Life:

The new, 113th Congress includes the first Buddhist to serve in the Senate, the first Hindu to serve in either chamber and the first member of Congress to describe her religion as “none,” continuing a gradual increase in religious diversity that mirrors trends in the country as a whole. While Congress remains majority Protestant, the institution is far less so today than it was 50 years ago, when nearly three-quarters of the members belonged to Protestant denominations.

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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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The economics of Left Behind, the movie, then and now

Left Behind, the movie, was either a commercial success or a commercial failure, depending on how you look at it. Depending on your expectations, and your understanding of the market for explicitly evangelical films.

The new version of the movie -- planned for release at the end of 2013, starring Nicolas Cage -- may or may not succeed in theaters. The way it's being produced, though, demonstrates how significantly the market has changed in in the last 12 years.

The original Left Behind was the most financial successful independent film of 2001, bringing in more than $2 million on its opening weekend in February of that year. It ultimately grossed $4.2 million, domestically.

An opening of $2 million can be horrible. Formula 51, also released in 2001, starring Samuel L. Jackson and Meatloaf (!), took in about $2 million on its opening weekend, and was considered a bomb, though investors made their money back and a bit of a profit on video rentals and foreign sales. Bubble Boy, starring Jake Gyllenhaal, took in $2 million on the opening weekend, ultimately grossed more than $5 million, and was also considered a commercial failure.

Nevertheless, Left Behind did a lot better than a lot of other films. Of the 356 films from that year ranked by Box Office Mojo according to commercial success, Left Behind came in at 157.

That isn't bad, but calling it a commercial success certainly evidences a limited vision. It's a success for an alternative movie, available only to a certain sub-market, a film blocked out of the mainstream distribution networks, advertised mainly through Sunday schools and prayer groups.



This is certainly how the production company, Cloud Ten, viewed the film. Their marketing strategy included selling DVDs before the theatrical release, with coupons included inside. They hoped to make money by keeping production costs very low -- scenes set in Israel were shot in Ontario with camels from the local zoo -- and attract an evangelical audience by casting Kirk Cameron and several celebrity ministers and Contemporary Christian Music stars as extras. As the executives of Cloud Ten saw it, there was no way to attract a mainstream audience or compete on the open market, given the hostility of the film industry and film critics towards evangelical Christianity and movies with a message.

One of the top people at Cloud Ten told Christianity Today that the film was guaranteed to be panned by critics, whatever its technical quality, "just because of the message."

The attitude seemed to be, why try?

The authors of the book, by contrast, have consistently sought to escape the limitations of the evangelical market, believing that their story could sell and would sell in the American mainstream, if produced and pushed correctly.

Left Behind, the book, for example, was published by the Christian publishing company Tyndale House, but was not sold only in Christian bookstores, as most Christian fiction had been up to that point, but by major booksellers and at Wal-Mart. Tim LaHaye and Jerry Jenkins' subsequent series was published with a secular publisher, Penguin, specifically because the company argued it could market the books to evangelicals and non-evangelicals. Those books were advertised on Christian radio, but also in USA Today.

LaHaye and Jenkins believed the 2001 film would be as successful as the Left Behind books, reaching millions, if it was made right and sold right.

That belief caused a pretty severe rift between the authors and the film producers: Jenkins panned the movie as harshly as any of the non-evangelical critics, calling it a poorly produced, glorified "church basement" film. LaHaye went further, actually filing suit against the producers for breach of contract, for making a bad movie, a suit that was settled out of court in 2008.

Cloud Ten defended itself as doing the best it could, given the circumstances. Circumstances have changed, though, and opinions at the studio seem to have shifted, too. Since regaining the rights to the film in 2012, it has put in motion a plan to reboot the series, this time with mainstream actors and a reported budget of $15 million. A distribution deal has been struck with Samuel Goldwyn Films, which isn't the biggest outfit in Hollywood, but has succeeded with other evangelical-friendly films such as Amazing Grace, which grossed $21 million, and Fireproof, which grossed  $33 million.

There are also now mainstream (if not solidly bankable) actors attached to this project, including Nicolas Cage, One Tree Hill's Chad Michael Murray, and High School Musical's Ashley Tinsdale.

That news has been met by some of the snark that Could Ten execs predicted back in 2005, when Peter Lalonde, who has written the new Left Behind scripted, bashed Hollywood for being anti-Christian, saying, "Of course Hollywood sends messages every day, but they have always had this mindset towards Christian films, and frankly I think they still do."

Whether or not that's true today, and whether or not Lalonde still thinks that's true, the market has changed, and the strategy for making and marketing an evangelical film has changed too. Now everyone, it seems, agrees with LaHaye and Jenkins.

The new Left Behind is attempting to recreate the success of other explicitly evangelical films, following a version of the model developed by Sony, which brought in $34 million domestically with Courageous and $43 million with Soul Surfer, a film made for $18 million, given serious publicity, and released in more than 2,000 theaters in 2010.

Part of that change can be attributed directly to the Left Behind books, which demonstrated a mainstream market for evangelical stories. The authors really envisioned a change in the market for novels and for films, where religious works wouldn't be segregated off into a sub-market but would be widely available, go mainstream and succeed.

Whether or not the new Left Behind movie attracts an audience is an open question. The brand isn't what it was at the beginning of the century. The controversies that might have sold tickets have long since gone away. The fact that investors are putting more up more than three times the amount the original movie brought in, though, goes to show how the market for Christian fiction has dramatically different than it was.

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What 'religious liberty' means

The lower courts considering religious objections to the new health care law have -- up to this point -- reached varying and sometimes conflicting conclusions. The legal precedents in these cases about corporatations' religious practices aren't particularly clear, it seems. The unanswered questions are bound to eventually go to the Supreme Court.

A bit of a consensus is emerging, though -- a coherent argument -- among the federal courts that have rejected the religious objections to the Obama administration's mandate that employee health insurance include coverage of birth control. The courts have sidestepped the question of whether corporations have religion, though noting that that's the fundamental issue, but have made a pair of critical arguments about what "religious liberty" means.

Or, more precisely, what religious liberty doesn't mean.

This can be seen in two rulings, as Religion Clause points out.

Judges Carol E. Jackson and Sarah Evans Barker both have argued that "religious liberty" can't mean requiring employees, as a condition of their employment, to adhere to owners' religious beliefs.

Here they flip the religious liberty argument on its head, and make the case that those who say they're defending "religious liberty" are actually asking for the right to impose religious beliefs on individuals who may not personally hold those beliefs. I.e., that they're saying it's a protected practice of their religions to require people who don't adhere to those religions to follow its precepts anyway. This, the two courts have said, is not protected by the "free exercise" clause of the First Amendment or the Religious Freedom Restoration Act.

Jackson:

The burden of which plaintiffs complain is that funds, which plaintiffs will contribute to a group health plan, might, after a series of independent decisions by health care providers and patients covered by [a health care] plan, subsidize someone else’s participation in an activity that is condemned by plaintiffs’ religion. 

[The Religious Freedom Restoration Act] is a shield, not a sword. It protects individuals from substantial burdens on religious exercise that occur when the government coerces action one’s religion forbids, or forbids action one’s religion requires; it is not a means to force one’s religious practices upon others. RFRA does not protect against the slight burden on religious exercise that arises when one’s money circuitously flows to support the conduct of other free-exercise-wielding individuals who hold religious beliefs that differ from one’s own.

 Barker:

We can imagine a wide variety of individual behaviors that might give rise to religiously-based scruples or opposition, such as alcohol consumption or using drugs or tobacco, or homosexual-related behaviors, all of which can threaten health conditions requiring treatment and care. If the financial support for health care coverage of which Plaintiffs complain constitutes a substantial burden, secular companies owned by individuals objecting on religious grounds to such behaviors, including those businesses owned by individuals objecting on religious grounds to all modern medical care, could seek exemptions from employer-provided health care coverage for a myriad of health care needs, or for that matter, for any health care at all to its employees.

These arguments are not so distinct from the question of who or what can "have" or "exercise" a religion, though. Not as separable from that problem as the courts seem to suppose. In fact, the assumptions built into both arguments seem to be that one can only individuals practice religion, and individuals' religious exercises are only valid, only constitutionally protected, insofar as that practices is not a matter of imposing a particular religious exercises on others.

A counter argument to this -- an argument I think has to be taken very seriously, even though (or, rather, because) the argument is essentially that pluralistic societies are impossible -- can be found in First Things. Greg Forster, writing about Starbucks making a political statement, writes:

This determination to protect people’s right to live in an amoral system of economic work is directly connected to the current threat to religious liberty. The basic idea is that only individuals have conscience rights; institutions like businesses are expected to be morally and even culturally neutral. This seems to be easily accomplished by giving every individual employee a veto power over the firm’s ability to say or do anything morally or culturally significant. However, in reality all human action is moral and cultural; this system doesn’t actually remove moral and cultural formation from business, it just requires businesses to conform to whatever beliefs are so socially predominant that the majority don’t even recognize them as beliefs

The question of the identity of the subject who has religion, of the definition of the agent doing the things religions' entail, has to be answered, as I see it. The question of what "religious liberty" means can only be answered when that prior question has been dealt with: answers to one entail certain answers to the other.

Judges Jackson and Barker haven't answer the question of who can have or practice religion, but they have begun to work out what one answer would mean for the definition of "religious liberty" and the scope of that sort of subject's "free exercise thereof." It's the beginnings, if nothing more, of a coherent and on-point answer to this question of the meaning of free religious exercise that has arisen in response to Obamacare.

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When Hobby Lobby decided it was opposed to providing birth control

As of today, the arts and crafts store Hobby Lobby, Inc., owes the federal government as much as $2.6 million. Tomorrow that may well be up to $3.9, and the day after tomorrow $5.2.

The company has committed to not paying these fines, claiming that they are being levied because the company refuses to compromise its religious beliefs about the evil of "abortion-causing" birth control.

As The Daily Oklahoman reports, the,

Oklahoma City-based Hobby Lobby will defy a federal law that requires employee health care plans to provide insurance coverage for types of contraception that the firm's owners consider to be “abortion-causing drugs and devices,” an attorney for the company said Thursday.

With Wednesday's rejection of an emergency stay of that federal health care law by Supreme Court Justice Sonia Sotomayor, Hobby Lobby and sister company Mardel could be subject to fines of up to $1.3 million a day beginning Tuesday.

'They're not going to comply with the mandate,' said Kyle Duncan, general counsel of The Beckett Fund for Religious Liberty, which is representing the company. 'They're not going to offer coverage for abortion-inducing drugs in the insurance plan.'

This stand will likely mean the corporation is hailed as modern day martyrs by some Christian conservatives. They might receive the same show of support that the fast food restaurant Chik-fil-A got when the the company's Chief Operating Officer made statements opposing same-sex marriage. This action -- refusing to provide employee health insurance that includes coverage of certain sorts of birth control, and refusing to pay the fine for breaking the law -- will be understood and interpreted as a stand for the robustness of religious liberty.

It turns out, though, that the verb tense of the lawyer's defiant claim,  "They're not going to offer coverage for abortion-inducing drugs in the insurance plan," is pretty important. They're not "going to," in the future.

But they did, in the past.

Legally, the question in the lawsuit Hobby Lobby has filed against the Department of Health and Human Services is more esoteric. The question is whether or not for-profit corporations have religions and exercise religion in the way that's talked about in the First Amendment.

That question isn't particularly relevant to the bulk of those concerned about this case, but that is the question before the courts. Publicly, among those most closely following these developments, the case is understood as actually being about religious liberty in American and the Obama administration's alleged attempts to limit the meaning of "religious exercise" to mere matters of belief and acts of worship, so that anything else that's done as the practice or outworking of piety, such as running a business, can only be strictly secular. For these folks, Hobby Lobby's mounting, unpaid fines are testament to its bold defense of robust religious liberty.

As one opinion-writer depicts this match-up, this is nothing less than a "war against [the] principled sector of the national economy," where,

The federal government is imposing a $1.3 million daily fine to destroy the Green family’s business or otherwise coerce them into violating their sincerely held religious convictions about the life of the unborn.

One problem with that: the company only very recently stopped providing insurance coverage of the supposedly objectionable forms of birth control to its employees.

This strong, strong stance seems to date, actually, only from the time the company learned it would soon be required by law to provide the sort of health insurance that they were already providing.

Hobby Lobby is currently facing mounting millions of dollars of fines for refusing to do what it previously did voluntarily.

For the lawsuit the corporation filed:

Recently, after learning about the nationally prominent HHS mandate controversy, Hobby Lobby re-examined its insurance policy to ensure they continued to be consistent with its faith. During that re-examination, Hobby Lobby discovered that the formulary for its prescription drug policy included two drugs -- Plan B and Ella -- that could cause an abortion. Coverage of these drugs was not included knowingly or deliberately by the Green family [members of which own the company via a trust]. Such coverage is out of step with the rest of Hobby Lobby's policies, which explicitly exclude abortion-causing contraceptive devices and pregnancy-termination drugs. Hobby Lobby therefore immediately excluded the inconsistent drugs from its policies. 

In other words, the company only took a stand -- a supposedly religious stand -- after this issue became a political issue.

The religious commitment of the people who own and run Hobby Lobby isn't in dispute. Either in the court case or anywhere else. Nor is there any question about whether or not they have made decisions that were bad for the bottom line because of those religious commitments. It's quite curious though, and I'd even say suspect, that this issue became an issue, a tenet, purportedly, of that religion the owners are committed to, after the political brouhaha over Obamacare.

While the lawyers and the plaintiffs are claiming the prohibition against certain forms of birth control are long-standing tenets of the corporation's faith -- in addition to the claim that a for-profit corporation can have and practice a faith -- the evidence the lawyers have offered suggests it's rather a new-found doctrine.

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The political act of good history

History is the raw material for nationalist or ethnic or fundamentalist ideologies, as poppies are the raw material for heroin addition. The past is an essential element, perhaps the essential element, in these ideologies. If there is no suitable past, it can always be invented. Indeed, in the nature of things there is usually no entirely suitable past, because the phenomenon these ideologies claim to justify is not ancient or eternal but historically novel .... 

In this situation historians find themselves in the unexpected role of political actors. I used to think that the profession of history, unlike that of say, nuclear physics, could at least do no harm. Now I know it can. Our studies can turn into bomb factories like the workshops in which the IRA has learned to transform chemical fertilizer into an explosive. This state of affairs affects us in two ways. We have a responsibility to historical facts in general, and for criticizing the politico-ideological abuse of history in particular. 

-- Eric Hobsbawm

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Books of 2012

1 The Essential Alan Watts, by Alan Watts
2 Grandfather, by Tom Brown, Jr
3 The Visitation, by Frank Peretti
4 They Speak with Other Tongues, by John L. Sherrill
5 The Last Battle, by C.S. Lewis
6 After Theory, by Terry Eagleton
7 Comfort and Joy: A Study of the Heidelberg Catechism, by Andrew Kuyvenhouen
8 Living the Heidelberg: The Heidelberg Catechism and the Moral Life, by Allen Verhey
9 Dutch Calvinism in Modern America, by James D. Bratt
10 Green River Killer, by Jeff Jensen & Jonathan Case
11 The Coming of the Book: The Impact of Printing, 1450-1800, by Lucien Febvre & Henri-Jean Maritan
12 Wittgenstein's Mistress, by David Markson
13 Letters to a Young Calvinist: An Invitation to the Reformed Tradition, by James K.A. Smith
14 A History of the Evangelical and Reformed Church, by David Dunn et al.
15 Divided by a Common Heritage, by Corwin Smith et al.
16 The Eastern Church in the Spiritual Marketplace: American Conversions to Orthodox Christianity, by Amy Slagle
17 Marx: A Very Short Introduction, by Peter Singer
18 For Marx, by Louis Althusser
19 A Contract with God, by Will Eisner
20 Aimee Semple McPherson and the Resurrection of Christian America , by Matthew Avery Sutton 21 Beginning Theroy, by Peter Barry
22 Chuck Smith Autobiography: A Memoir of Grace, by Chuck Smith
23 Frank Bartleman's Azusa Street, ed. Roberts Liardon
24 The Fire Spreads: Holiness and Pentecostalism in the American South, by Randall J. Stephens
25 A Feast of Snakes, by Harry Crews
26 Culture and Materialism, by Raymond Williams
27 Introducing Derrida, by Jeff Collins and Bill Mayblin
28 The Book of Mormon Girl, by Joanna Brooks
29 Expect a Miracle, by Oral Roberts
30 Canaan Land: A Religious History of African Americans, by Albert J. Raboteau
31 Tongues of Men and Angels: The Religious Language of Men and Angels, by William J. Samarin
32 Fields White Unto Harvest, by James R. Goff, Jr.
33 Nine O'clock in the Morning, by Dennis J. Bennett
34 Train Dreams, by Denis Johnson
35 The Fugitive Blacksmith, by James W.C. Pennington
36 The Drop, by Michael Connelly
37 Watching Dallas, by Ien Ang
38 Awkwardness, by Adam Kotsko
39 Why We Love Sociopaths, by Adam Kotsko
40 The Dawn Patrol, by Don Winslow
41 Looking Awry: An Introduction to Jacques Lacan through Popular Culture, by Slavoj Žižek
42 The Supernatural Ways of Royalty, by Kris Vallotton and Bill Johnson
43 Prayer is Invading the Impossible, by Jack Hayford
44 The Devil All the Time, by Donald Ray Pollack
45 What is Cultural History, by Peter Burke
46 Canada, by Richard Ford
47 Without God, Without Creed, by James Turner
48 Communication and the Evolution of Society, by Jürgen Habermas
49 Buddha in Blue Jeans, by Tai Sheridan
50 Every Love Story is a Ghost Story, by D.T. Max
51 Manual of Zen Buddhism, by Daisetz Teitaro Suzuki
52 Through the Fire, by Shawn Grady
53 Mind and Cosmos, by Thomas Nagel
54 The New Atheist Novel, by Authur Bradley and Andrew Tate
55 The Communist Hypothesis, by Alain Badiou
56 The Assassination of Jessee James by the Coward Robert Ford, by Ron Hansen
57 Fun Home, by Allison Bechdel
58 An Awareness of What is Missing, by Jürgen Habermas, et al.
59 The Word in the World, by Candy Gunther Brown
60 California, by Jennifer Denrow
61 American Exorcism, by Michael W. Cuneo
62 The Walking Dead, Book One, by Robert Kirkman
63 Knox's Irregulars, by J. Wesley Bush
64 VALIS, by Philip K. Dick
65 Karl Marx, by Francis Wheen
66 Modern Social Imaginaries, by Charles Taylor

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