I was raised Roman Catholic, and for quite awhile during my adolescence, I was very devout. I knew nothing of knowing Jesus, but I was a good Catholic until . . . well, until I wasn't. And then I met Christ, and I became not-Catholic, which, since I'm not of the Orthodox communion, means I'm Protestant.
And because Protestants rebel against "formal" prayers -- memorized script that can be mumbled through by rote or offered to the Lord in utter sincerity -- I've filed away, largely unretrieved, the ones I learned in catechism. I say the Lord's Prayer; Catholics don't claim it as only theirs. I reject the Hail Mary, though, just as I no longer sing the hymn "Immaculate Mary" -- because it refers to the Immaculate Conception, which is not, as many people think, the doctrine of Christ's virgin birth, but the peculiarly Catholic doctrine (and by "peculiar," I mean "specific to," not "weird") of Mary's impeccability, or her absolute, unchangeable sinlessness. Mary needed a Savior, too, and I'm pretty sure, after reading the Magnificat in the Gospel of Luke, that she was well aware of it.
But for whatever reason -- very likely the reality that, like Mary, I'm also not in possession of a sinlessly impeccable soul -- I have held onto the Act of Contrition, a lovely prayer that doesn't confer grace or forgiveness, but simply pleads it, and pleads it with a simple confidence in the finished work of Christ Jesus. It may be something to commit to memory, just in case you, Mary, and me have that sin thing in common among us.
Oh, Lord, my God, I am heartily sorry
for having offended Thee.
And I detest all my sins because of
thy just punishments,
but most of all because they offend Thee,
my God,
who art all good and deserving of all my love.
I firmly resolve, with the help of Thy grace,
to sin no more and to avoid the near occasion of sin,
Amen
Our impromptu, unscripted prayers, whether in crisis or devotion, don't save us, and neither do traditional, scripted prayers. Only God Almighty, Father, Son and Holy Spirit, saves us and rescues us from sin's hold. We evangelicals reject "rote" prayers, which cease to be rote, only written, when uttered in humility and sincerity. But I think there are words and prayers, traditions and rituals, that guide and comfort us. The Spirit's work isn't guaranteed in the impromptu, nor necessarily quenched in the written. There's nothing specifically "Catholic" in the Act of Contrition; it speaks nothing of transubstantiation or Purgatory or Mary's conception, immaculate or common. It does, though, firmly place the commission of sin in our own rebellion and will, and seeks only God's merciful promise to remedy what we've wrought.
In our fear of "looking Catholic" by reciting scripted prayer, we sometimes end up looking, sounding and feeling just a bit less Christlike. We may be avowedly Protestant, but being Protestant never saved anyone. That someone else first thought of the words of a prayer, and generations have preserved it, makes it no more or no less appropriate and grace-filled. For us to believe that only the impromptu prayers that spring from our hearts can please God is, I'm afraid, evidence that there will always be a need for the love affirmed in the Act -- words on paper, pouring nonetheless from the hearts of women and men afraid to pray a formal, scripted prayer out of worry that they might get it wrong, not do it right, or otherwise offend their God.
Wednesday, March 17, 2010
Sunday, March 14, 2010
Relationship and Observation
"When a man goes out of the room, he leaves everything in it behind. A woman . . . carries everything that happened in the room along with her." -- Alice Munro
Glenn Beck and "Social Justice" Churches
Glenn Beck, too many words of whose should, I think, be taken with a grain of salt and a stiff spray of Lysol, last week warned his many listeners to stay away from any church that proclaims an interest in "social justice."
Run, Glenn says. Be afraid. Be very afraid. Because these churches, he warned, are nothing more than bastions of liberal/socialist politics, determined to wreak havoc in the name of Christ on all that's good and decent in America.
But Jim Wallis, of Sojourners community, an evangelical social-justice church and ministry, objects strongly, pointing out that a concern for the poor ought to be part of the agenda of every Christ-following church in the world. He correctly points out that when a church calls for and demonstrates peace, justice, and righteousness in dealing with "the least of these," it does so not because it's liberal or conservative, but because it's Biblical. Wallis and millions of other Christians who care about social justice -- and I'm one of them -- believe that God is not a Democrat or a Republican. What I've called elsewhere the "Third Way of the Cross" is what motivates us -- not allegiance to our preferred spot on the political couch. Sadly, there's much truth, but little of the Truth, in the contention that "liberal" churches care about social sin at the expense of personal holiness, just as "conservative" churches focus on personal sin and ignore, or define very narrowly, the corporate sin that pervades society. In doing so, both miss the boat, regardless of the banners and flags they run up the mast.
When Christ-followers take up certain political or social positions that fall somewhere to the left of other people's beliefs isn't an indication that they're operating as the Church Of Jesus As Divine Liberal, utterly divorced from the counsel of Scripture or the will of God. And when sincere believers examine Scripture and are convinced that certain positions are correct -- positions and views that may fall on the right part of the spectrum -- it can't be assumed, with "proper" bitterness from the left, that they've re-cast Christ as frontman for the GOP. It's not that easy, however tempting it may be.
Conservatives are wrong when they proclaim that only those things that fall, in the economy of our current political parlance, under the "right-wing" heading are truly Christian; liberals ought to be corrected, too, when they assume that truly following Jesus will always send a disciple further to the left than the guy next to him is. And while true believers can legitimately disagree on social policy -- a truth that appears to come as a real shock to too many otherwise decent folks -- it seems clear to me that there is only one hallmark of a true, Christian Church, only one criteria that reveals whether or not its allegiance is to Christ Jesus as Lord and Savior, to Jesus As Ultimate Liberal, or to Christ As Conservative King.
The Church exists to worship God and make disciples. Period.
It shouldn't preach salvation and ignore the plight of the poor, just as it shouldn't devote itself to peace, justice and poverty issues without announcing forgiveness of sins in Christ. The "social gospel" without conviction of sin and the promise of new life in Christ is no gospel at all; the "salvation gospel" without calling for justice in showing Biblical concern for the outcast isn't, either. Beck, who tragically thinks that "social justice" is the province only of fools and liberals, cares little for the Church Jesus is building; he does conservatives no favors in presuming that they agree with him. That anyone other than his dog listens to Glenn Beck is truly tragic, as tragic for him as it is for the health of civil discourse in this country.
There are many ways to describe a particular congregation's mission. It might announce that it exists to know God and make him known. It may announce its intent to go into the world and make disciples; it may focus on prayer, praise, and proclamation. A congregation may call itself a "Christian community" or a "family fellowship," and the Lord Jesus is pleased if what binds the people together is their unity in worshiping him and in seeking to introduce others to him -- not just to get them saved, not only to minister to their needs or speak for their protection, but to help them become devoted, growing disciples, worshiping together our Triune God. Lord help the church whose highest call is social justice, even in his name. And may God give life to the church whose only focus is on saving souls -- without transforming lives or confronting both the personal and societal sin that chains them.
James writes that the one who insists he has faith but has no deeds of kindness to show for it has, in reality, no faith at all. What good is it if we have the very Word of life but don't also offer bread to the one both lost and starving? Likewise, how dare we offer a banquet to the poor while allowing their spiritual starvation? James writes that "Religion that God our Father accepts as pure and faultless is this: to look after orphans and widows in their distress and to keep oneself from being polluted by the world" (James 1:27).
That sounds like a call for social justice and care for the poor to me. It also sounds like a plea for personal holiness. Do we dare echo Glenn Beck in deciding that either part of this mandate is unnecessary -- or, worse, the province of false prophets and enemies? I love to see churches with banners proclaiming Good News for the poor and calendars full of ministry work with the poor and outcast. But if a ministry doesn't plead with people to come in repentance to Christ Jesus and humbly accept his sacrifice for their sins, its ministers themselves are as poor and lost as those they seek, even in all sincerity, to serve.
Our politics ought to look much like, and certainly reflect, the Cross -- spreading a little to the right, a little to the left, and always reaching up to the One who is all Truth and who will not be held hostage to the whims and wills of even his most fervent followers on the left or the right.
Run, Glenn says. Be afraid. Be very afraid. Because these churches, he warned, are nothing more than bastions of liberal/socialist politics, determined to wreak havoc in the name of Christ on all that's good and decent in America.
But Jim Wallis, of Sojourners community, an evangelical social-justice church and ministry, objects strongly, pointing out that a concern for the poor ought to be part of the agenda of every Christ-following church in the world. He correctly points out that when a church calls for and demonstrates peace, justice, and righteousness in dealing with "the least of these," it does so not because it's liberal or conservative, but because it's Biblical. Wallis and millions of other Christians who care about social justice -- and I'm one of them -- believe that God is not a Democrat or a Republican. What I've called elsewhere the "Third Way of the Cross" is what motivates us -- not allegiance to our preferred spot on the political couch. Sadly, there's much truth, but little of the Truth, in the contention that "liberal" churches care about social sin at the expense of personal holiness, just as "conservative" churches focus on personal sin and ignore, or define very narrowly, the corporate sin that pervades society. In doing so, both miss the boat, regardless of the banners and flags they run up the mast.
When Christ-followers take up certain political or social positions that fall somewhere to the left of other people's beliefs isn't an indication that they're operating as the Church Of Jesus As Divine Liberal, utterly divorced from the counsel of Scripture or the will of God. And when sincere believers examine Scripture and are convinced that certain positions are correct -- positions and views that may fall on the right part of the spectrum -- it can't be assumed, with "proper" bitterness from the left, that they've re-cast Christ as frontman for the GOP. It's not that easy, however tempting it may be.
Conservatives are wrong when they proclaim that only those things that fall, in the economy of our current political parlance, under the "right-wing" heading are truly Christian; liberals ought to be corrected, too, when they assume that truly following Jesus will always send a disciple further to the left than the guy next to him is. And while true believers can legitimately disagree on social policy -- a truth that appears to come as a real shock to too many otherwise decent folks -- it seems clear to me that there is only one hallmark of a true, Christian Church, only one criteria that reveals whether or not its allegiance is to Christ Jesus as Lord and Savior, to Jesus As Ultimate Liberal, or to Christ As Conservative King.
The Church exists to worship God and make disciples. Period.
It shouldn't preach salvation and ignore the plight of the poor, just as it shouldn't devote itself to peace, justice and poverty issues without announcing forgiveness of sins in Christ. The "social gospel" without conviction of sin and the promise of new life in Christ is no gospel at all; the "salvation gospel" without calling for justice in showing Biblical concern for the outcast isn't, either. Beck, who tragically thinks that "social justice" is the province only of fools and liberals, cares little for the Church Jesus is building; he does conservatives no favors in presuming that they agree with him. That anyone other than his dog listens to Glenn Beck is truly tragic, as tragic for him as it is for the health of civil discourse in this country.
There are many ways to describe a particular congregation's mission. It might announce that it exists to know God and make him known. It may announce its intent to go into the world and make disciples; it may focus on prayer, praise, and proclamation. A congregation may call itself a "Christian community" or a "family fellowship," and the Lord Jesus is pleased if what binds the people together is their unity in worshiping him and in seeking to introduce others to him -- not just to get them saved, not only to minister to their needs or speak for their protection, but to help them become devoted, growing disciples, worshiping together our Triune God. Lord help the church whose highest call is social justice, even in his name. And may God give life to the church whose only focus is on saving souls -- without transforming lives or confronting both the personal and societal sin that chains them.
James writes that the one who insists he has faith but has no deeds of kindness to show for it has, in reality, no faith at all. What good is it if we have the very Word of life but don't also offer bread to the one both lost and starving? Likewise, how dare we offer a banquet to the poor while allowing their spiritual starvation? James writes that "Religion that God our Father accepts as pure and faultless is this: to look after orphans and widows in their distress and to keep oneself from being polluted by the world" (James 1:27).
That sounds like a call for social justice and care for the poor to me. It also sounds like a plea for personal holiness. Do we dare echo Glenn Beck in deciding that either part of this mandate is unnecessary -- or, worse, the province of false prophets and enemies? I love to see churches with banners proclaiming Good News for the poor and calendars full of ministry work with the poor and outcast. But if a ministry doesn't plead with people to come in repentance to Christ Jesus and humbly accept his sacrifice for their sins, its ministers themselves are as poor and lost as those they seek, even in all sincerity, to serve.
Our politics ought to look much like, and certainly reflect, the Cross -- spreading a little to the right, a little to the left, and always reaching up to the One who is all Truth and who will not be held hostage to the whims and wills of even his most fervent followers on the left or the right.
Wednesday, March 10, 2010
Parry And Thrust With Ashwin
I really appreciate dialoguing with Ashwin, who comments regularly on the blog -- you can read them at the end of the posts. But I'm dismayed that he thinks that my disagreements with, in this case, the Crazy Demon-Obsessed People and the "Satan curses the womb" Bible study leader took the form all those years ago of angry outbursts and blistering interaction. He thinks I'm a really angry woman, easily set off and entirely likely to erupt in verbal volcanics at the slightest provocation.
Kind of not, actually.
I doubt that Ashwin and I will ever have the opportunity to sit down over a cup of coffee, and that's too bad. I think, though, that he sees me through a framework, whether informed by culture, theology, practice or experience, that pictures dissent as arguing, arguing as anger, anger as belligerence, and belligerence as damaging. That's an interesting point of view, but it can lead, I think, to an unfortunate leap from "dissent" to "belligerence."
Belligerence is, indeed, damaging. It's always wrong, never productive; Ashwin and I agree on that. But dissent doesn't have to lead to viciousness in dialogue or practice. That assumption is dangerous in itself -- good arguments are disregarded, or feared, because "argument" is taken not as "valid point," but "fight." Ashwin and I clearly would argue this point; we might even have an argument over it. But I don't think that leaping off the dock of dissent always results in swimming in the shark-infested waters of anger, disrespect, and loss of self-control. Far from it.
I wish the Church fought more -- against the bad stuff, against sin. But to sprint from "dissent" to "belligerence" in framing debate, while appearing noble, can actually be cowardly. I wish that Ashwin were more able to simply read my words, which I don't think are belligerent or vicious or damaging, without assuming that what's behind them is an angry woman. There are things that make me angry, and ought to make him angry, too. Frankly, if you're not angry about much of what happens in the world, you're either not paying attention or you're too damned comfortable.
But there's a difference between feeling anger and being an angry person, and I suspect that "angry woman" is the real point here. My sense is that Ashwin's filter results in a processing of my writing that dresses what I say with a little extra burden of " . . . as a woman." You know -- as in, "she analyzes Wilson's theology AS A WOMAN," or "AS A WOMAN, she dares to confront Crazy, Demon-Obsessed People," which I think can drift toward a cultural viewing, particularly in the Church, of women's anger and women's beliefs as vaguely irrational and emotion-fed even before that apparently inevitable point of bitchiness is reached. It becomes, then, not my point that's considered, but the MAKING of that point, as a woman, that adorns it with the burden of presumed irrationality, emotion, and even inappropriateness.
I wonder if to Ashwin I'm "she who dares to speak apart from her husband's covering." It wouldn't be the first time I've heard that. I think that Jeff doesn't engage with people while carrying the burden of gender expectations and misconception, primarily because men haven't had to wrestle with that one; he has that in common with Wilson, Ashwin, and every other man motivated to speak out. Their words stand on their own -- no layers of emotion, hormones, or irrationality to peel away. Doug Wilson has literally written the book on the use of sarcasm and biting interaction and has garnered a well-earned reputation for his ability to verbally fillet opponents. He's heir to the mantle of Chesterton in Ashwin's eyes; I write passionately and strongly about very real problems of conduct and doctrine, and the presumption is that I'm just flying off the handle. That's instructive.
While I'm acutely aware that I speak sharply, even cross the line on rare occasions, for which I've always apologized, I can't help but wonder if Ashwin reads my words on their own, or if they arrive to him only seen through a filter of Woman Speaking. I am convinced that the presence of the Holy Spirit in my life requires that I be kind, which usually, but not always, involves being nice. Sometimes it doesn't; "nice" can be an impediment to truth-telling and insight, but unkindness is never called for. Meanwhile, Ashwin's hero Wilson is neither particularly nice nor even terribly kind in his writing -- and that writing quite often leads to the sort of pastoral involvement that's quite unkind in burdening the flock. It's true that Wilson doesn't seem to get angry very often, but he's got snottiness down to a "T." While it's not real ladylike to say so, that doesn't make it less true. Besides, I value being a strong woman over being a lady, and I value truth and righteousness, even righteousness in anger, more than anything else. "Snotty" fits here -- "homos," "aging hippies," "druid lesbian softball coaches," and harangues against the "litur-gay," anyone?
There is no point worth making that can't be made kindly. Likewise, even the strongest words in dissent of error or in defense of truth don't have to slide inexorably into abusive anger. But fear of genuine debate, a preference for niceness over substance, and an assumption that the gender of the speaker is itself the filter through which words are studied is part of what's led Evangelicalism to the irrelevant, ineffective, and inane cultural game of catch-up it's been engaging in for the last 50 years or so. Prophetic voices come from women and from men; so do erroneous ones. But let's take the words themselves and not assign perspective, or make conclusions about her or his character, to the speaker on the basis of gender.
Kind of not, actually.
I doubt that Ashwin and I will ever have the opportunity to sit down over a cup of coffee, and that's too bad. I think, though, that he sees me through a framework, whether informed by culture, theology, practice or experience, that pictures dissent as arguing, arguing as anger, anger as belligerence, and belligerence as damaging. That's an interesting point of view, but it can lead, I think, to an unfortunate leap from "dissent" to "belligerence."
Belligerence is, indeed, damaging. It's always wrong, never productive; Ashwin and I agree on that. But dissent doesn't have to lead to viciousness in dialogue or practice. That assumption is dangerous in itself -- good arguments are disregarded, or feared, because "argument" is taken not as "valid point," but "fight." Ashwin and I clearly would argue this point; we might even have an argument over it. But I don't think that leaping off the dock of dissent always results in swimming in the shark-infested waters of anger, disrespect, and loss of self-control. Far from it.
I wish the Church fought more -- against the bad stuff, against sin. But to sprint from "dissent" to "belligerence" in framing debate, while appearing noble, can actually be cowardly. I wish that Ashwin were more able to simply read my words, which I don't think are belligerent or vicious or damaging, without assuming that what's behind them is an angry woman. There are things that make me angry, and ought to make him angry, too. Frankly, if you're not angry about much of what happens in the world, you're either not paying attention or you're too damned comfortable.
But there's a difference between feeling anger and being an angry person, and I suspect that "angry woman" is the real point here. My sense is that Ashwin's filter results in a processing of my writing that dresses what I say with a little extra burden of " . . . as a woman." You know -- as in, "she analyzes Wilson's theology AS A WOMAN," or "AS A WOMAN, she dares to confront Crazy, Demon-Obsessed People," which I think can drift toward a cultural viewing, particularly in the Church, of women's anger and women's beliefs as vaguely irrational and emotion-fed even before that apparently inevitable point of bitchiness is reached. It becomes, then, not my point that's considered, but the MAKING of that point, as a woman, that adorns it with the burden of presumed irrationality, emotion, and even inappropriateness.
I wonder if to Ashwin I'm "she who dares to speak apart from her husband's covering." It wouldn't be the first time I've heard that. I think that Jeff doesn't engage with people while carrying the burden of gender expectations and misconception, primarily because men haven't had to wrestle with that one; he has that in common with Wilson, Ashwin, and every other man motivated to speak out. Their words stand on their own -- no layers of emotion, hormones, or irrationality to peel away. Doug Wilson has literally written the book on the use of sarcasm and biting interaction and has garnered a well-earned reputation for his ability to verbally fillet opponents. He's heir to the mantle of Chesterton in Ashwin's eyes; I write passionately and strongly about very real problems of conduct and doctrine, and the presumption is that I'm just flying off the handle. That's instructive.
While I'm acutely aware that I speak sharply, even cross the line on rare occasions, for which I've always apologized, I can't help but wonder if Ashwin reads my words on their own, or if they arrive to him only seen through a filter of Woman Speaking. I am convinced that the presence of the Holy Spirit in my life requires that I be kind, which usually, but not always, involves being nice. Sometimes it doesn't; "nice" can be an impediment to truth-telling and insight, but unkindness is never called for. Meanwhile, Ashwin's hero Wilson is neither particularly nice nor even terribly kind in his writing -- and that writing quite often leads to the sort of pastoral involvement that's quite unkind in burdening the flock. It's true that Wilson doesn't seem to get angry very often, but he's got snottiness down to a "T." While it's not real ladylike to say so, that doesn't make it less true. Besides, I value being a strong woman over being a lady, and I value truth and righteousness, even righteousness in anger, more than anything else. "Snotty" fits here -- "homos," "aging hippies," "druid lesbian softball coaches," and harangues against the "litur-gay," anyone?
There is no point worth making that can't be made kindly. Likewise, even the strongest words in dissent of error or in defense of truth don't have to slide inexorably into abusive anger. But fear of genuine debate, a preference for niceness over substance, and an assumption that the gender of the speaker is itself the filter through which words are studied is part of what's led Evangelicalism to the irrelevant, ineffective, and inane cultural game of catch-up it's been engaging in for the last 50 years or so. Prophetic voices come from women and from men; so do erroneous ones. But let's take the words themselves and not assign perspective, or make conclusions about her or his character, to the speaker on the basis of gender.
How NOT To Use Statistics
We all know that desperate, ignorant, or misguided people can use statistics, as errant theologians sometimes use Scripture, in the way a drunk man uses a streetlamp -- for support, not light.
This is especially common, it seems, when addressing social ills. Unfortunately, when it comes to drug policy, true data leads to conclusions that are anything other than true. Religious conservatives, inoculated against critical analysis of information by a culture that disdains the academic while relying on the emotion, often fall prey to this in arguing social policy -- with disturbing results. Stats are that part of the arsenal that make the user look solid, unless the one wielding them can't figure out which end is up.
I experienced this a few months ago while debating with a friend, a 20-year veteran of prison administration, about the legalization of marijuana. Don is foursquare, vehemently, solidly against it. I am, as I've made clear, in favor of legalization. I readily admit that he knows more about prisons and criminals than I do, and I know more about . . . well, some things, one of which, in this conversation at least, was the correct use of statistics.
Don pointed out that more than 95 percent of the men serving drug-related sentences in his particular prison, a high-security unit in Western Washington, had used marijuana before moving to cocaine, meth, heroin, and other narcotics. And he's right -- as a matter of fact, I bet the number is higher than that. Point conceded.
Only a very few men serving drug-related sentences haven't used marijuana; for those who did, marijuana was clearly the "gateway" drug Joe Friday and every cop since then has warned about. His belief, then, is that if 95 percent of the drug criminals he knows of began with pot, then pot is the problem and should be outlawed.
But that point -- that an overwhelming number of drug users and drug criminals started with marijuana -- says only that. It doesn't say, not even close, that 95 percent of people who use marijuana go on to use hard drugs. That would be significant, but Don's stats don't say that. It sounds ironclad, but it's an argument from the wrong end and a terrible way to formulate social policy.
Most hard-drug users began their mornings with Rice Krispies, enjoyed baby carrots at lunch, and snuck extra cookies after dinner. Tell me that 95 percent of Snap, Krackle, and Pop fans go on to methamphetamines, and there might be a point to cereal prohibition. But to conclude that the slurping of kiddie cereal is the primary contributing factor to future drug use falls wide of the mark, we can all agree, particularly because it turns out that most cereal-eating kids don't go on to anything harder than Multi-Grain Cheerios.
True: An enormous percentage of drug criminals started their mornings as children with cereal. False: Cereal consumption inexorably leads to drug usage. True: A tremendously high percentage of drug criminals smoked marijuana before they found heroin. False: A tremendously high percentage of marijuana users become drug criminals. Switch around the nouns, and the argument stands or falls.
Unfortunately, that happens too often, and those rigidly devoted to law and order seize upon stats like those offered by my friend to make false -- and societally damaging -- conclusions. I was dismayed, frankly, that a man as experienced and intelligent as Don would handle data so clumsily. But arguments like his have prevailed in marijuana legislation for decades. I understand the difference between baby carrots and marijuana, and I would caution anyone who uses weed that it could -- could -- get out of hand, kind of like beer, brownies, and butter. But I wouldn't assume that virtually every pot smoker I know will go on to manufacture meth in a trailer or sell coke to schoolkids. I didn't, and I bet you didn't, either.
There are myriad social factors that contribute to hard-drug use and addiction. We'd all be better served if legislators focused on those things rather than continue a failed, illogical policy of criminalizing pot. The things that contribute to addiction and criminal behavior are complicated, but aren't common to everyone who smokes. Responsible pot smokers aren't contributing to major social dysfunction. They're breaking the law only because there's a law in place to break, and it's time that we acknowledge that all that's rolled up in a joint is a little bit of dried weed -- not the decline of civilization as we know it.
This is especially common, it seems, when addressing social ills. Unfortunately, when it comes to drug policy, true data leads to conclusions that are anything other than true. Religious conservatives, inoculated against critical analysis of information by a culture that disdains the academic while relying on the emotion, often fall prey to this in arguing social policy -- with disturbing results. Stats are that part of the arsenal that make the user look solid, unless the one wielding them can't figure out which end is up.
I experienced this a few months ago while debating with a friend, a 20-year veteran of prison administration, about the legalization of marijuana. Don is foursquare, vehemently, solidly against it. I am, as I've made clear, in favor of legalization. I readily admit that he knows more about prisons and criminals than I do, and I know more about . . . well, some things, one of which, in this conversation at least, was the correct use of statistics.
Don pointed out that more than 95 percent of the men serving drug-related sentences in his particular prison, a high-security unit in Western Washington, had used marijuana before moving to cocaine, meth, heroin, and other narcotics. And he's right -- as a matter of fact, I bet the number is higher than that. Point conceded.
Only a very few men serving drug-related sentences haven't used marijuana; for those who did, marijuana was clearly the "gateway" drug Joe Friday and every cop since then has warned about. His belief, then, is that if 95 percent of the drug criminals he knows of began with pot, then pot is the problem and should be outlawed.
But that point -- that an overwhelming number of drug users and drug criminals started with marijuana -- says only that. It doesn't say, not even close, that 95 percent of people who use marijuana go on to use hard drugs. That would be significant, but Don's stats don't say that. It sounds ironclad, but it's an argument from the wrong end and a terrible way to formulate social policy.
Most hard-drug users began their mornings with Rice Krispies, enjoyed baby carrots at lunch, and snuck extra cookies after dinner. Tell me that 95 percent of Snap, Krackle, and Pop fans go on to methamphetamines, and there might be a point to cereal prohibition. But to conclude that the slurping of kiddie cereal is the primary contributing factor to future drug use falls wide of the mark, we can all agree, particularly because it turns out that most cereal-eating kids don't go on to anything harder than Multi-Grain Cheerios.
True: An enormous percentage of drug criminals started their mornings as children with cereal. False: Cereal consumption inexorably leads to drug usage. True: A tremendously high percentage of drug criminals smoked marijuana before they found heroin. False: A tremendously high percentage of marijuana users become drug criminals. Switch around the nouns, and the argument stands or falls.
Unfortunately, that happens too often, and those rigidly devoted to law and order seize upon stats like those offered by my friend to make false -- and societally damaging -- conclusions. I was dismayed, frankly, that a man as experienced and intelligent as Don would handle data so clumsily. But arguments like his have prevailed in marijuana legislation for decades. I understand the difference between baby carrots and marijuana, and I would caution anyone who uses weed that it could -- could -- get out of hand, kind of like beer, brownies, and butter. But I wouldn't assume that virtually every pot smoker I know will go on to manufacture meth in a trailer or sell coke to schoolkids. I didn't, and I bet you didn't, either.
There are myriad social factors that contribute to hard-drug use and addiction. We'd all be better served if legislators focused on those things rather than continue a failed, illogical policy of criminalizing pot. The things that contribute to addiction and criminal behavior are complicated, but aren't common to everyone who smokes. Responsible pot smokers aren't contributing to major social dysfunction. They're breaking the law only because there's a law in place to break, and it's time that we acknowledge that all that's rolled up in a joint is a little bit of dried weed -- not the decline of civilization as we know it.
Sunday, March 7, 2010
On Prostitution, Prostitutes, and Laws That Harm Them
Wow. The things my friends and I discuss over coffee . . .
But last week John and I wandered onto the subject of my year in Odessa, Texas, as a young cop reporter -- the fortunate one on the newspaper staff who gets to report on, and witness the aftermath of, the violent crimes, the bloody car wrecks and plane crashes, and the blistering examples of poverty- and abuse-turned-vice in the paper's circulation area. That was me in 1983. I'm not sure it was the best job for a 22-year-old away from home for the first time in a terribly violent city with no friends or family. But I did have T.J. and Casey, and I was blessed to call them friends.
These women worked as prostitutes out of the stately confines of Odessa's Antler Inn, a rundown motel just off the grungiest bar- and strip-joint slice of this racial tinderbox of 100,000 people suddenly aware that massive resources of oil in the Permian Basin was, in the early 1980s, no longer a guarantee of continued prosperity. I had proposed a series of articles on the sex trade in Odessa, and their subsequent publication garnered me the admiration of my more refined peers and the wrath of West Texas Christiandom, which found myriad ways to express fury over Sunday newspapers that discussed oral sex and lesbianism. I couldn't get a seat in a restaurant or cash a check at a store for weeks, it seemed, but during my research, I met these two women and we became friends.
Besides being one of the geographically ugliest places I've ever seen, Odessa was hostage to the fluctuations of the oil market. Frustration reigned and rage simmered among men accustomed not to the excesses of great wealth, perhaps, but to steady work in relatively high-paying jobs and the accompanying prestige of big trucks, big belt buckles, and big-haired women. The sex trade flourished, as it does when men accustomed to victory find themselves drowning in loss -- that is, if "flourished" is the word for dirty sex in dirty surroundings with angry men and thoroughly defeated women.
Casey and T.J. were, in ways of the heart and the pocketbook, thoroughly defeated women, beaten in body and spirit by those who should have loved them, and smart enough to know how to work through it. They were heroin addicts, and their love for each other, however dysfunctional at times, was profound; it kept them alive, I'm convinced, after nights and days of impersonal sex with men who held them in utter contempt but needed servicing. They knew what they were. They knew what they weren't, and they knew that I loved them very much. T.J., in particular, was one of the kindest women I've ever known, and I'm sad that we lost touch with each other after she went to prison for heroin possession.
Do I need to say that prostitution is wrong -- that it's sin, both for the woman and for the man? It's adultery, and it's unloving; men who frequent prostitutes are not men who have an innate respect for women, and angry men who make use of defeated women act in contempt, not simply lust. Still, I believe that sexual sin in particular comes from a wellspring of need; it's an illegitimate means of meeting an entirely legitimate need, whether for release, relationship, or respite from something too heavy to bear. Nonetheless, prostitution elevates no one and offends the righteousness of God.
It's sin, but it shouldn't be a crime. The purpose of law is not to convey societal disapproval of behavior. If that were the case, then adultery without payment would be illegal, and enforced, and so would multiple and careless marriages, bigotry, and a host of other things that make us sniff in disgust, confident that we're somehow above such things. Laws exist to protect people, and within the goal of protecting people is the implication that harming them is wrong -- societal disapproval of wrongful actions against others is expressed in laws against murder, rape, assault, theft, and driving like an idiot through crosswalks peppered with pedestrians. Evangelicals may argue that no crime and no sin is "victimless," but we acknowledge, generally, that both the law and the Law are inadequate to secure true morality, and we therefore call for the State to enact laws that protect people and their property, their rights and their livelihoods, from aggression, physical or otherwise.
So if prostitution harms women, and at least causes spiritual injury to men, why not continue to make it illegal? The answer lies in what I'm convinced is the true motivation of anti-prostitution laws, and that is societal disapproval of women who sell sex, not of the transaction or its content.
Women who let men pay to use their bodies are generally not women raised in families or cultures or lifestyles that allowed them the luxury of contemplating various career options. I'm aware of the high-priced, pampered whores who entertain powerful men in relationships they find liberating and reciprocal; I'm also aware that that's nonetheless a tragedy, and that most prostitutes live and work under the constant reality of rape, assault, theft, and degradation-laced poverty unlike anything you or I could imagine. And while the escorts to the elite enjoy the protection of high-class propriety and madams who watch over them, most sex workers are subject to abuse from both the men who hire them and quite often the men who recruit, pimp, and control them. Or, like Casey and T.J., they work independently, which means they keep their earnings but have no pimp to beat the hell out of anyone who threatens his investment.
So women who engage in prostitution are vulnerable -- vulnerable to the economic, social, psychological, and gender realities that turned them toward prostitution, and vulnerable to the men over them as pimps or under them as johns. They're quite aware of the disapproval of society. But they need, and deserve, the protection of the law. Women who work as prostitutes have few options for recourse or protection if they're beaten, robbed, or raped, unlike women who aren't prostitutes. The reporting of a crime against them requires their taking the very real risk that accompanies an acknowledgment of having engaged in illegal activity -- they can be arrested on the basis of information that accompanies their report, and they are disregarded simply as whores who, after all, signed up for it all when they "decided" to turn to prostitution. The woman is left entirely without protection, subject to abuse from johns and pimps and arrest from the police who, I'd venture to say, generally would regard a crime against you or me with much more severity and energy than a crime against a whore.
It's easy to point out that prostitutes volitionally engage in sex for payment with strangers, which I suppose makes it easy to decide that having made their criminal and immoral beds, these women now have to lie in them. Most of them didn't enter the world of sex-for-payment with a gun pointed at their heads. That's true. What's equally true, though, is that most turned to prostitution out of despair, poverty, and hopelessness -- not the despair that we feel when a relationship falls apart, not the economic stresses altogether common to most people at some point in our lives, and not the vague sense of ennui, or even the profound acceptance of profound misfortune, that defines the bleak periods in our lives. Most of us have some resources, internal or external, that weave together to provide a rope of encouragement and expectation that can lift us out of acute or chronic tragedy. But when women lack that, when their lives are riddled with degradation and addiction and abuse and anger and violence, that rope doesn't exist, and they are led to conclude that legitimate needs can be met, and rent can be paid, through illegitimate means.
It's about the next fix, or the rent, or dinner; women don't become prostitutes so that they can give conventional Judeo-Christian morality a stiff middle finger. They don't becomes whores as a political statement, a "fuck that," against your values or mine. And I doubt very much that women consider prostitution alongside career options we find acceptable, but are nonetheless out of reach for them -- I think the dilemma is not along the lines of, gee, selling my body, or becoming a marine biologist? Enduring long nights of dirty, degrading sex for pay, or getting a bachelor's degree in English? I've written before that poverty has much more to do with a paucity of education, a lack of economic means and advancement, and entrenched political disenfranchisement than simply with a shortage, however chronic, of cash. A society truly concerned with Biblical morality would be infinitely more concerned with expressing disapproval of the political, educational, economic, sexual and cultural factors that drive women into prostitution than it would be to simply label her actions as wrong -- wrong, and therefore illegal, and therefore removing them from the protection they require and deserve. Such a society -- and we don't have it now -- would reject simplistic calls for preserving Biblical sexual morality through legislation and would, instead, devote itself to the understanding that prostitutes, like everyone else whose degradation, rejection, and disenfranchisement makes them "least of these" of whom Christ spoke -- with whom he identified, for whom he died -- are worthy of mercy. Law cannot make people righteous, but it can express some framework of mercy that the Church could operate in. Likewise, the absence of laws against certain things doesn't convey societal approval, and Christians needn't be worried that without laws against it, prostitution will become an exciting career option for their daughters, or that the absence of legal disapproval will result in a wholesale overhaul of sexual mores.
It comes down to what it is we truly value. I would hope that the Body of Christ would be infinitely more concerned with the well-being of women, of daughters and sisters and mothers, than with the need to encode into law what Christ and they, and I, find morally objectionable. But we tend to value morality more than we value women. Opening our arms -- our protective and loving arms -- to prostitutes, and removing the barriers to their claims for police protection, would, I know, be a far more moral and Christlike approach to healing sexual sin in society. Lamentably, it's easier -- less messy and less risky to the gleaming tidiness of our own little sexual cocoons -- to try to please the Lord Jesus by standing on the right side of the law instead of standing shoulder-to-shoulder with the devastated women he died for.
But last week John and I wandered onto the subject of my year in Odessa, Texas, as a young cop reporter -- the fortunate one on the newspaper staff who gets to report on, and witness the aftermath of, the violent crimes, the bloody car wrecks and plane crashes, and the blistering examples of poverty- and abuse-turned-vice in the paper's circulation area. That was me in 1983. I'm not sure it was the best job for a 22-year-old away from home for the first time in a terribly violent city with no friends or family. But I did have T.J. and Casey, and I was blessed to call them friends.
These women worked as prostitutes out of the stately confines of Odessa's Antler Inn, a rundown motel just off the grungiest bar- and strip-joint slice of this racial tinderbox of 100,000 people suddenly aware that massive resources of oil in the Permian Basin was, in the early 1980s, no longer a guarantee of continued prosperity. I had proposed a series of articles on the sex trade in Odessa, and their subsequent publication garnered me the admiration of my more refined peers and the wrath of West Texas Christiandom, which found myriad ways to express fury over Sunday newspapers that discussed oral sex and lesbianism. I couldn't get a seat in a restaurant or cash a check at a store for weeks, it seemed, but during my research, I met these two women and we became friends.
Besides being one of the geographically ugliest places I've ever seen, Odessa was hostage to the fluctuations of the oil market. Frustration reigned and rage simmered among men accustomed not to the excesses of great wealth, perhaps, but to steady work in relatively high-paying jobs and the accompanying prestige of big trucks, big belt buckles, and big-haired women. The sex trade flourished, as it does when men accustomed to victory find themselves drowning in loss -- that is, if "flourished" is the word for dirty sex in dirty surroundings with angry men and thoroughly defeated women.
Casey and T.J. were, in ways of the heart and the pocketbook, thoroughly defeated women, beaten in body and spirit by those who should have loved them, and smart enough to know how to work through it. They were heroin addicts, and their love for each other, however dysfunctional at times, was profound; it kept them alive, I'm convinced, after nights and days of impersonal sex with men who held them in utter contempt but needed servicing. They knew what they were. They knew what they weren't, and they knew that I loved them very much. T.J., in particular, was one of the kindest women I've ever known, and I'm sad that we lost touch with each other after she went to prison for heroin possession.
Do I need to say that prostitution is wrong -- that it's sin, both for the woman and for the man? It's adultery, and it's unloving; men who frequent prostitutes are not men who have an innate respect for women, and angry men who make use of defeated women act in contempt, not simply lust. Still, I believe that sexual sin in particular comes from a wellspring of need; it's an illegitimate means of meeting an entirely legitimate need, whether for release, relationship, or respite from something too heavy to bear. Nonetheless, prostitution elevates no one and offends the righteousness of God.
It's sin, but it shouldn't be a crime. The purpose of law is not to convey societal disapproval of behavior. If that were the case, then adultery without payment would be illegal, and enforced, and so would multiple and careless marriages, bigotry, and a host of other things that make us sniff in disgust, confident that we're somehow above such things. Laws exist to protect people, and within the goal of protecting people is the implication that harming them is wrong -- societal disapproval of wrongful actions against others is expressed in laws against murder, rape, assault, theft, and driving like an idiot through crosswalks peppered with pedestrians. Evangelicals may argue that no crime and no sin is "victimless," but we acknowledge, generally, that both the law and the Law are inadequate to secure true morality, and we therefore call for the State to enact laws that protect people and their property, their rights and their livelihoods, from aggression, physical or otherwise.
So if prostitution harms women, and at least causes spiritual injury to men, why not continue to make it illegal? The answer lies in what I'm convinced is the true motivation of anti-prostitution laws, and that is societal disapproval of women who sell sex, not of the transaction or its content.
Women who let men pay to use their bodies are generally not women raised in families or cultures or lifestyles that allowed them the luxury of contemplating various career options. I'm aware of the high-priced, pampered whores who entertain powerful men in relationships they find liberating and reciprocal; I'm also aware that that's nonetheless a tragedy, and that most prostitutes live and work under the constant reality of rape, assault, theft, and degradation-laced poverty unlike anything you or I could imagine. And while the escorts to the elite enjoy the protection of high-class propriety and madams who watch over them, most sex workers are subject to abuse from both the men who hire them and quite often the men who recruit, pimp, and control them. Or, like Casey and T.J., they work independently, which means they keep their earnings but have no pimp to beat the hell out of anyone who threatens his investment.
So women who engage in prostitution are vulnerable -- vulnerable to the economic, social, psychological, and gender realities that turned them toward prostitution, and vulnerable to the men over them as pimps or under them as johns. They're quite aware of the disapproval of society. But they need, and deserve, the protection of the law. Women who work as prostitutes have few options for recourse or protection if they're beaten, robbed, or raped, unlike women who aren't prostitutes. The reporting of a crime against them requires their taking the very real risk that accompanies an acknowledgment of having engaged in illegal activity -- they can be arrested on the basis of information that accompanies their report, and they are disregarded simply as whores who, after all, signed up for it all when they "decided" to turn to prostitution. The woman is left entirely without protection, subject to abuse from johns and pimps and arrest from the police who, I'd venture to say, generally would regard a crime against you or me with much more severity and energy than a crime against a whore.
It's easy to point out that prostitutes volitionally engage in sex for payment with strangers, which I suppose makes it easy to decide that having made their criminal and immoral beds, these women now have to lie in them. Most of them didn't enter the world of sex-for-payment with a gun pointed at their heads. That's true. What's equally true, though, is that most turned to prostitution out of despair, poverty, and hopelessness -- not the despair that we feel when a relationship falls apart, not the economic stresses altogether common to most people at some point in our lives, and not the vague sense of ennui, or even the profound acceptance of profound misfortune, that defines the bleak periods in our lives. Most of us have some resources, internal or external, that weave together to provide a rope of encouragement and expectation that can lift us out of acute or chronic tragedy. But when women lack that, when their lives are riddled with degradation and addiction and abuse and anger and violence, that rope doesn't exist, and they are led to conclude that legitimate needs can be met, and rent can be paid, through illegitimate means.
It's about the next fix, or the rent, or dinner; women don't become prostitutes so that they can give conventional Judeo-Christian morality a stiff middle finger. They don't becomes whores as a political statement, a "fuck that," against your values or mine. And I doubt very much that women consider prostitution alongside career options we find acceptable, but are nonetheless out of reach for them -- I think the dilemma is not along the lines of, gee, selling my body, or becoming a marine biologist? Enduring long nights of dirty, degrading sex for pay, or getting a bachelor's degree in English? I've written before that poverty has much more to do with a paucity of education, a lack of economic means and advancement, and entrenched political disenfranchisement than simply with a shortage, however chronic, of cash. A society truly concerned with Biblical morality would be infinitely more concerned with expressing disapproval of the political, educational, economic, sexual and cultural factors that drive women into prostitution than it would be to simply label her actions as wrong -- wrong, and therefore illegal, and therefore removing them from the protection they require and deserve. Such a society -- and we don't have it now -- would reject simplistic calls for preserving Biblical sexual morality through legislation and would, instead, devote itself to the understanding that prostitutes, like everyone else whose degradation, rejection, and disenfranchisement makes them "least of these" of whom Christ spoke -- with whom he identified, for whom he died -- are worthy of mercy. Law cannot make people righteous, but it can express some framework of mercy that the Church could operate in. Likewise, the absence of laws against certain things doesn't convey societal approval, and Christians needn't be worried that without laws against it, prostitution will become an exciting career option for their daughters, or that the absence of legal disapproval will result in a wholesale overhaul of sexual mores.
It comes down to what it is we truly value. I would hope that the Body of Christ would be infinitely more concerned with the well-being of women, of daughters and sisters and mothers, than with the need to encode into law what Christ and they, and I, find morally objectionable. But we tend to value morality more than we value women. Opening our arms -- our protective and loving arms -- to prostitutes, and removing the barriers to their claims for police protection, would, I know, be a far more moral and Christlike approach to healing sexual sin in society. Lamentably, it's easier -- less messy and less risky to the gleaming tidiness of our own little sexual cocoons -- to try to please the Lord Jesus by standing on the right side of the law instead of standing shoulder-to-shoulder with the devastated women he died for.
It Bears Repeating . . .
From feminist and suffragette Susan B. Anthony, 1889, on abortion:
"Sweeter even than to have had the joy of caring for children of my own has it been to me to help bring about a better state of things for mothers generally, so their unborn little ones could not be willed away from them."
As the mother of two of the finest young men I've ever known, and a woman who's seen much pain and desperation in the lives of women around her, I couldn't agree more.
"Sweeter even than to have had the joy of caring for children of my own has it been to me to help bring about a better state of things for mothers generally, so their unborn little ones could not be willed away from them."
As the mother of two of the finest young men I've ever known, and a woman who's seen much pain and desperation in the lives of women around her, I couldn't agree more.
Saturday, March 6, 2010
And Speaking Of Planned Parenthood . . .
It's really pretty simple.
I wish Planned Parenthood would continue its excellent work in providing gynecological health services and contraception counseling for women but remove itself from any involvement at all in the provision of elective abortion -- not abortion to save the life of the mother and, in my mind, not abortion due to rape or incest, but in elective abortion, the reasons for which I know, sadly, appear as life- or soul-shattering to some women as the two I've mentioned.
I wish, with equal conviction, that Christian "life counseling" services would continue their policy of neither counseling nor providing abortion and instead would offer comprehensive, non-judgmental women's health services, including contraception counseling, for those who need it, focusing on the health and empowerment of women and preaching a pro-life message that embodies reverence for life from conception 'til death -- including care for the already-born poor around them.
Asked and answered, and yet somehow I think we won't be moving along . . .
I wish Planned Parenthood would continue its excellent work in providing gynecological health services and contraception counseling for women but remove itself from any involvement at all in the provision of elective abortion -- not abortion to save the life of the mother and, in my mind, not abortion due to rape or incest, but in elective abortion, the reasons for which I know, sadly, appear as life- or soul-shattering to some women as the two I've mentioned.
I wish, with equal conviction, that Christian "life counseling" services would continue their policy of neither counseling nor providing abortion and instead would offer comprehensive, non-judgmental women's health services, including contraception counseling, for those who need it, focusing on the health and empowerment of women and preaching a pro-life message that embodies reverence for life from conception 'til death -- including care for the already-born poor around them.
Asked and answered, and yet somehow I think we won't be moving along . . .
Answering Ashwin On The Fruit Of The Womb
I'm wondering if you all can smell the brimstone . . . Ashwin thinks I've waaaay crossed the line, and I'm reprinting his rebuke here in its entirety. I take to heart what he says, but I'm afraid I don't agree with his conclusions. Nonetheless, I thank him for taking the time to write.
So, here's a comment from Ashwin on my previous post regarding the punishing or cursing of the womb --
"There is so much here that invites comment.
Mr. Marshall may or may not need rebuking. What he does not need is perfect strangers bringing down fire from heaven on his head. You may criticize whatever weird views he may hold but you may not drag our Lord's name into it. THAT is something for those who love him. Neither you nor I can make that claim.
And for all the weirdness of his views, he and I and you hold to the weirdest view in all Creation: That the Word of God became flesh and walked among us, suffered and died on the cross for OUR sins that we may be deemed righteous before God our Father. There is no view that I know that is as weird as this one - so completely does it fly against the grain of all natural reason. And yet it is so.
And it is therefore rich that your definition of "reasonableness" involves a worldview absent of devils. There ARE devils. There IS warfare going on. And they are defeated ONLY by invoking the name of Jesus Christ for it is by His sacrifice ALONE that they are overcome. It is therefore perfectly sensible to acknowledge their existence and give glory to God for their defeat.
It does not do to be so ready to condemn ignorance in others.
And funnily enough you ARE the only Christian I know to be kicked out of a Bible study. Quite a feat to be ejected from a club that is notoriously lax in its membership criteria. This is a first.
And this is not at all a good sign especially since you find yourself capable of being quite charitable regarding Planned Parenthood's "contribution to women's health" while find you find nothing but "prophetic anger" towards a lady trying to comfort a devastated mother.
You have made Christ a servant to your ideology. IT SHOULD BE THE OTHER WAY ROUND!!!"
Ashwin
*****************************************************
OK. There's a lot here. First, I think it's important that I repeat what I'm pretty sure I've stated before: I believe there is a literal Devil, a Satan bent on wreaking havoc in the world and trying to wreak havoc in the believer's life. But I don't believe that having a disabled baby is evidence that he's succeeded.
No Christian has the luxury of assigning Satan a role as some fairytale imp who somehow represents icky things while hopping about the Earth in a red leotard and bad makeup. To not acknowledge that there is a Devil eternally opposed to all that's good, holy, righteous and pure is to ignore the clear counsel of Scripture. Liberals may want to assign the Bible's teachings on Satan to the realm of allegory or metaphor, but I'm not a liberal Christian in my understanding of doctrine. I believe that the crux of the redemption story is that Satan has injected, with my cooperation and yours, evil into what once was pure -- and will be pure again because of the fullness of the Kingdom of God, purchased by the blood of Christ Jesus and sealed by his resurrection.
There's not a person alive who hasn't seen evidence, all around them and in their own life, of the workings of evil. And they may understand those workings to be the natural way of the world, entirely apart from supernatural involvement, or believe as I do that there is real evil in a real Satan. Their disbelief in the Biblical doctrine of evil in no way lessens Satan's affect on the world, or my conviction that what the Word of God says about Satan is true. Thankfully, the Lord Jesus has defeated Satan -- whether or not I agree, understand it, see it around me, or give it any particular thought at all.
But there's a tendency in the Church to conflate the reality that we all live in a fallen, sin-soaked world with specific acts of personal, directed malice from Satan. If you asked me why there's disease in the world, I might respond that it's because the world has fallen from its pure, holy, originally created state -- that we were meant to live, not die, and yet in this sliver of eternity, death is our enemy. But if you ask me why Bucky has leukemia, my answer will not -- cannot -- suggest that Bucky brought leukemia onto himself by cursing Jesus or by inviting Satan into his blood. I think you would not only appreciate my response, but find it entirely Biblical.
Marshall, in my post below, did not speak that way of women who deliver disabled babies, and in fact said just the opposite: That post-abortive women deliver disabled babies because Jesus is punishing them. The Crazy Demon-Obsessed People, or the Bible study leader, didn't simply acknowledge that we live in a fallen world and sometimes fetal development goes awry; they told women -- grieving women, burdened women, Christian women -- that miscarriage or Down's Syndrome was a result of cursing God in the womb. Tell me, Ashwin, what Godly comfort that offers women? Tell me how that comports with 2 Corinthians 1, wherein we are charged to comfort one another in truth. And tell me how it's somehow worse for me to take them to task than it is for them to make the initial charge -- as ludicrous as it is ugly, as bizarre as it is uncharitable -- in the first place.
You may believe, brother Ashwin, that Jesus smites post-abortive women by striking their wombs. I prefer to believe that the wrath of God against sin is, as the Scriptures triumphantly proclaim, nailed to the cross of Jesus Christ. As the hymn says, "I bear it no more; praise the Lord, it is well with my soul." You may believe that Down's Syndrome is the result of a curse -- and I know thousands of parents of Down's Syndrome children would vehemently, passionately, in the name of Jesus, refute you. They believe their children to be "perfectly themselves," as they are, and I would not want to be one who suggests that the apples of their eyes are somehow rotted fruit from a poisoned tree. Do you?
Finally, you are angry with me -- and I absolutely affirm not only your right to choose to be, but the care for my soul that I believe accompanies your wrath -- for my public rebuke of Marshall, the Crazy Demon-Obsessed People, and the hapless Bible study leader. I was in relationship with the CDOPs and the woman leading the study, and their errors were severe -- as severe in their context as Peter's error in not eating with Gentiles, which prompted immediate, public, strong, and specific rebuke from Paul. And Marshall, representing the work and Word of the Lord Jesus, spoke public error, for which public rebuke is appropriate, Biblical, and necessary. Of course he'll never read my words; if he did, who knows what he'd do with them. But people around me, people who read my blog, have read what he said. They deserve to know that there are Christians who believe that the reasonable, not to mention kindest and most Christlike explanation, for fetal abnormality is not that the woman must've had an abortion -- or, that if a woman who has had an abortion gets pregnant again and carries to term, that baby could very well carry a message of cursing from God in the form of a missing chromosome.
So here's my view of evil: Satan has poured effluent -- crap, shit -- into the perfect world God made, and we swim in that world. You swim in a sewer, you're going to have some of its filth cling to you; it's impossible to live in a sinful, fallen world without sinning and without being stung by the sin around you from eternity past. And while all of us are contributing to the filth and decadence of the world around us, it negates the enormity of the atonement and resurrection to suggest that we're helpless, hopeless, or, worse, conspirators whose pain is justified, even after we've trusted in the Christ who delivers us. Surely you know that.
You're correct, and blessedly so, that the weirdest thing in the world is God-made-human, securing our redemption, our cleansing, on a murderer's cross. But that weirdness brings life. That something else is "weird," or a mystery, or supernatural, doesn't mean that it corresponds with truth. God has revealed how we are to come to him -- in faith in Christ Jesus -- and we are not free to conjecture, particularly when it devastates the tender, grieving members of the Body -- how we can fit Satan into the whole mess. Or the whole blessing.
So, here's a comment from Ashwin on my previous post regarding the punishing or cursing of the womb --
"There is so much here that invites comment.
Mr. Marshall may or may not need rebuking. What he does not need is perfect strangers bringing down fire from heaven on his head. You may criticize whatever weird views he may hold but you may not drag our Lord's name into it. THAT is something for those who love him. Neither you nor I can make that claim.
And for all the weirdness of his views, he and I and you hold to the weirdest view in all Creation: That the Word of God became flesh and walked among us, suffered and died on the cross for OUR sins that we may be deemed righteous before God our Father. There is no view that I know that is as weird as this one - so completely does it fly against the grain of all natural reason. And yet it is so.
And it is therefore rich that your definition of "reasonableness" involves a worldview absent of devils. There ARE devils. There IS warfare going on. And they are defeated ONLY by invoking the name of Jesus Christ for it is by His sacrifice ALONE that they are overcome. It is therefore perfectly sensible to acknowledge their existence and give glory to God for their defeat.
It does not do to be so ready to condemn ignorance in others.
And funnily enough you ARE the only Christian I know to be kicked out of a Bible study. Quite a feat to be ejected from a club that is notoriously lax in its membership criteria. This is a first.
And this is not at all a good sign especially since you find yourself capable of being quite charitable regarding Planned Parenthood's "contribution to women's health" while find you find nothing but "prophetic anger" towards a lady trying to comfort a devastated mother.
You have made Christ a servant to your ideology. IT SHOULD BE THE OTHER WAY ROUND!!!"
Ashwin
*****************************************************
OK. There's a lot here. First, I think it's important that I repeat what I'm pretty sure I've stated before: I believe there is a literal Devil, a Satan bent on wreaking havoc in the world and trying to wreak havoc in the believer's life. But I don't believe that having a disabled baby is evidence that he's succeeded.
No Christian has the luxury of assigning Satan a role as some fairytale imp who somehow represents icky things while hopping about the Earth in a red leotard and bad makeup. To not acknowledge that there is a Devil eternally opposed to all that's good, holy, righteous and pure is to ignore the clear counsel of Scripture. Liberals may want to assign the Bible's teachings on Satan to the realm of allegory or metaphor, but I'm not a liberal Christian in my understanding of doctrine. I believe that the crux of the redemption story is that Satan has injected, with my cooperation and yours, evil into what once was pure -- and will be pure again because of the fullness of the Kingdom of God, purchased by the blood of Christ Jesus and sealed by his resurrection.
There's not a person alive who hasn't seen evidence, all around them and in their own life, of the workings of evil. And they may understand those workings to be the natural way of the world, entirely apart from supernatural involvement, or believe as I do that there is real evil in a real Satan. Their disbelief in the Biblical doctrine of evil in no way lessens Satan's affect on the world, or my conviction that what the Word of God says about Satan is true. Thankfully, the Lord Jesus has defeated Satan -- whether or not I agree, understand it, see it around me, or give it any particular thought at all.
But there's a tendency in the Church to conflate the reality that we all live in a fallen, sin-soaked world with specific acts of personal, directed malice from Satan. If you asked me why there's disease in the world, I might respond that it's because the world has fallen from its pure, holy, originally created state -- that we were meant to live, not die, and yet in this sliver of eternity, death is our enemy. But if you ask me why Bucky has leukemia, my answer will not -- cannot -- suggest that Bucky brought leukemia onto himself by cursing Jesus or by inviting Satan into his blood. I think you would not only appreciate my response, but find it entirely Biblical.
Marshall, in my post below, did not speak that way of women who deliver disabled babies, and in fact said just the opposite: That post-abortive women deliver disabled babies because Jesus is punishing them. The Crazy Demon-Obsessed People, or the Bible study leader, didn't simply acknowledge that we live in a fallen world and sometimes fetal development goes awry; they told women -- grieving women, burdened women, Christian women -- that miscarriage or Down's Syndrome was a result of cursing God in the womb. Tell me, Ashwin, what Godly comfort that offers women? Tell me how that comports with 2 Corinthians 1, wherein we are charged to comfort one another in truth. And tell me how it's somehow worse for me to take them to task than it is for them to make the initial charge -- as ludicrous as it is ugly, as bizarre as it is uncharitable -- in the first place.
You may believe, brother Ashwin, that Jesus smites post-abortive women by striking their wombs. I prefer to believe that the wrath of God against sin is, as the Scriptures triumphantly proclaim, nailed to the cross of Jesus Christ. As the hymn says, "I bear it no more; praise the Lord, it is well with my soul." You may believe that Down's Syndrome is the result of a curse -- and I know thousands of parents of Down's Syndrome children would vehemently, passionately, in the name of Jesus, refute you. They believe their children to be "perfectly themselves," as they are, and I would not want to be one who suggests that the apples of their eyes are somehow rotted fruit from a poisoned tree. Do you?
Finally, you are angry with me -- and I absolutely affirm not only your right to choose to be, but the care for my soul that I believe accompanies your wrath -- for my public rebuke of Marshall, the Crazy Demon-Obsessed People, and the hapless Bible study leader. I was in relationship with the CDOPs and the woman leading the study, and their errors were severe -- as severe in their context as Peter's error in not eating with Gentiles, which prompted immediate, public, strong, and specific rebuke from Paul. And Marshall, representing the work and Word of the Lord Jesus, spoke public error, for which public rebuke is appropriate, Biblical, and necessary. Of course he'll never read my words; if he did, who knows what he'd do with them. But people around me, people who read my blog, have read what he said. They deserve to know that there are Christians who believe that the reasonable, not to mention kindest and most Christlike explanation, for fetal abnormality is not that the woman must've had an abortion -- or, that if a woman who has had an abortion gets pregnant again and carries to term, that baby could very well carry a message of cursing from God in the form of a missing chromosome.
So here's my view of evil: Satan has poured effluent -- crap, shit -- into the perfect world God made, and we swim in that world. You swim in a sewer, you're going to have some of its filth cling to you; it's impossible to live in a sinful, fallen world without sinning and without being stung by the sin around you from eternity past. And while all of us are contributing to the filth and decadence of the world around us, it negates the enormity of the atonement and resurrection to suggest that we're helpless, hopeless, or, worse, conspirators whose pain is justified, even after we've trusted in the Christ who delivers us. Surely you know that.
You're correct, and blessedly so, that the weirdest thing in the world is God-made-human, securing our redemption, our cleansing, on a murderer's cross. But that weirdness brings life. That something else is "weird," or a mystery, or supernatural, doesn't mean that it corresponds with truth. God has revealed how we are to come to him -- in faith in Christ Jesus -- and we are not free to conjecture, particularly when it devastates the tender, grieving members of the Body -- how we can fit Satan into the whole mess. Or the whole blessing.
Friday, March 5, 2010
Now, Then -- Where Was I?
Computer problems, tax time, and a huge editing project all have kept me from blogging last week, but I'm back, laptop fixed, tax information reasonably organized, and . . . a huge editing project still undone.
Nonetheless, I promised in my former post to comment on a particularly vile bit o' spewage from Republican Virginia State Delegate Bob Marshall. This is the sort of thing for which the Christian Right is tragically becoming known, to the shame of Christ Jesus and the Gospel, not to mention reasonable civic dialogue. Marshall needs to be confronted by those in the Church who recognize that calculated viciousness is not a fruit of the Holy Spirit and ought not be an entry onto the wider stage of Christian political engagement.
Remember that while I am not a fan of Planned Parenthood's abortion engagement, although I do appreciate their significant contribution to women's health. Those of us who believe abortion is the taking of human life ought to rise up and condemn this sort of ugliness, insisting that Marshall and others like him not be allowed to speak for the pro-life movement.
So we have the putatively Christ-following Marshall speaking at a press conference against state funding for Planned Parenthood. He blasted the organization for supporting a woman’s right to choose abortion, saying that God punishes women who have had abortions by giving them disabled children:
“The number of children who are born subsequent to a first abortion with handicaps has increased dramatically. Why? Because when you abort the first born of any, nature takes its vengeance on the subsequent children. In the Old Testament, the first born of every being, animal and man, was dedicated to the Lord. There’s a special punishment, Christians would suggest.”
Let me be clear. Marshall knows not of what he preaches. This kind of thing, frankly, makes me wonder if he knows the Christ he represents as smiter of infants. That's not the Christ I know.
There is a tragedy that emerges from abortion, I believe, and its first manifestation is the death of the unborn baby. The woman suffers, too. While I have doubts about the prevalence of "Post-Abortion Syndrome" in women who have terminated pregnancies, I do think that abortion represents a failure in society -- a web of broken promises, failed dreams, abandonment, isolation, and oppression that can cause a mother to see abortion as the last, best choice she can make. If subsequent births bring babies with disabilities, that's not because of nature wreaking vengeance on her. It's ignorant to suggest that it is, and it's injurious to the cause of Christ to hurt women by doing so.
I might well be the only Christian woman you know who's been kicked out of a Bible study. And Jeff and I have left a few churches, and have done so for pretty significant reasons. More on that later . . . but one church experience stands out from this discussion, and I think it's a good way to end.
When we were in Monroe, Washington, the church we went to had a wonderful, kind, intelligent pastor, whose departure left the congregation reeling. In the vacuum came a married couple we still refer to as The Crazy Demon-Obsessed People, and they were able, astonishingly, to assume positions of real influence in the congregation. She believed herself to be a teacher, based not on any particular study of the Scriptures, but solely on her experiences with "inner healing." By visualizing Jesus in her past memories, she claimed to have been delivered from crippling depression, agoraphobia, and social anxiety disorder.
That may well have been, but it inculcated in her an obsession with seeing Satan under every bush, behind every door, around every corner, and in the uteruses of women who miscarried. She taught, both in women's Bible studies and from the pulpit, that miscarriage or birth disabilities resulted from a woman's, perhaps unintentional, inviting of Satan to curse her womb and her baby -- either because she was ambivalent about the pregnancy, or because she subconsciously hated the gender of the unborn baby. The cure was envisioning Jesus battling Satan in the womb, and the rest is history, as was the presence of the Emerine-Mixes in that congregation.
I was astonished at a theology that was so Satan-dependent for its legitimacy, and furious at the ease with which reasonable women and men -- or so I thought -- welcomed the dangerous absurdity of bad theology and twisted obstetrics. But I also knew a few women in the church who had lost pregnancies, and some of them were young Christians who were damaged and hurt by the idea that they had contributed in some way to their miscarriages. Around this time, I was in a women's Bible study, something I'm fundamentally opposed to in most cases, with two other women. One had a profoundly disabled, non-verbal, autistic son; the other had a charming little dude with Down's Syndrome. I had two kids, had miscarried between their pregnancies, and thought I'd enjoy the time with other neighborhood moms.
The study was intolerable. The first woman had -- gee, how to put it? -- a theology that reeked of the ineffably bizarre. The mother of the boy with Down's was a new believer, and I'd been a Christian for about a decade. I'm an easygoing type of gal. I want to nurture other believers and help others learn the Bible. But I can't now, and couldn't then, tolerate hearing the first woman "confess" that she had "produced" her very ill son after having given Satan dominion over her uterus, and she was, having repented, now waiting for his complete physical healing of autism, tachycardia, epilepsy, profound intellectual deficit, and deafness. It would come, she said, just as the complete physical "healing" -- in her mind, the reversal and elimination of any sign of Down's Syndrome in the six-year-old boy -- would come, on this side of eternity, once the young mom "repented" of having turned the workings of her uterus, ovaries, and vagina over to the Devil. Little Michael's mom broke down sobbing, and I went prophetically angry. It may have even looked ballistic. Either way, it resulted in my being asked to never come to the study again.
This sort of hideous ignorance, masquerading as theology, is too common in the Church, the one place where loving God with both mind and heart ought to result in mercy, forgiveness, new starts, and a healthy grasp of reality. I doubt that the Crazy Demon-Obsessed People have much influence beyond whatever congregation they've floated into now, and the last I heard of my former neighbor is that her marriage collapsed, her son is still institutionalized, and she drifts from church to church. But the teaching leaves its impact on real women, real hearts, and real emotions. The Church would do well to model Christ and focus a whole lot less on women's uteruses and more on their hearts, minds, and souls.
Ushering people like Marshall off the media pulpit would be an excellent start.
Nonetheless, I promised in my former post to comment on a particularly vile bit o' spewage from Republican Virginia State Delegate Bob Marshall. This is the sort of thing for which the Christian Right is tragically becoming known, to the shame of Christ Jesus and the Gospel, not to mention reasonable civic dialogue. Marshall needs to be confronted by those in the Church who recognize that calculated viciousness is not a fruit of the Holy Spirit and ought not be an entry onto the wider stage of Christian political engagement.
Remember that while I am not a fan of Planned Parenthood's abortion engagement, although I do appreciate their significant contribution to women's health. Those of us who believe abortion is the taking of human life ought to rise up and condemn this sort of ugliness, insisting that Marshall and others like him not be allowed to speak for the pro-life movement.
So we have the putatively Christ-following Marshall speaking at a press conference against state funding for Planned Parenthood. He blasted the organization for supporting a woman’s right to choose abortion, saying that God punishes women who have had abortions by giving them disabled children:
“The number of children who are born subsequent to a first abortion with handicaps has increased dramatically. Why? Because when you abort the first born of any, nature takes its vengeance on the subsequent children. In the Old Testament, the first born of every being, animal and man, was dedicated to the Lord. There’s a special punishment, Christians would suggest.”
Let me be clear. Marshall knows not of what he preaches. This kind of thing, frankly, makes me wonder if he knows the Christ he represents as smiter of infants. That's not the Christ I know.
There is a tragedy that emerges from abortion, I believe, and its first manifestation is the death of the unborn baby. The woman suffers, too. While I have doubts about the prevalence of "Post-Abortion Syndrome" in women who have terminated pregnancies, I do think that abortion represents a failure in society -- a web of broken promises, failed dreams, abandonment, isolation, and oppression that can cause a mother to see abortion as the last, best choice she can make. If subsequent births bring babies with disabilities, that's not because of nature wreaking vengeance on her. It's ignorant to suggest that it is, and it's injurious to the cause of Christ to hurt women by doing so.
I might well be the only Christian woman you know who's been kicked out of a Bible study. And Jeff and I have left a few churches, and have done so for pretty significant reasons. More on that later . . . but one church experience stands out from this discussion, and I think it's a good way to end.
When we were in Monroe, Washington, the church we went to had a wonderful, kind, intelligent pastor, whose departure left the congregation reeling. In the vacuum came a married couple we still refer to as The Crazy Demon-Obsessed People, and they were able, astonishingly, to assume positions of real influence in the congregation. She believed herself to be a teacher, based not on any particular study of the Scriptures, but solely on her experiences with "inner healing." By visualizing Jesus in her past memories, she claimed to have been delivered from crippling depression, agoraphobia, and social anxiety disorder.
That may well have been, but it inculcated in her an obsession with seeing Satan under every bush, behind every door, around every corner, and in the uteruses of women who miscarried. She taught, both in women's Bible studies and from the pulpit, that miscarriage or birth disabilities resulted from a woman's, perhaps unintentional, inviting of Satan to curse her womb and her baby -- either because she was ambivalent about the pregnancy, or because she subconsciously hated the gender of the unborn baby. The cure was envisioning Jesus battling Satan in the womb, and the rest is history, as was the presence of the Emerine-Mixes in that congregation.
I was astonished at a theology that was so Satan-dependent for its legitimacy, and furious at the ease with which reasonable women and men -- or so I thought -- welcomed the dangerous absurdity of bad theology and twisted obstetrics. But I also knew a few women in the church who had lost pregnancies, and some of them were young Christians who were damaged and hurt by the idea that they had contributed in some way to their miscarriages. Around this time, I was in a women's Bible study, something I'm fundamentally opposed to in most cases, with two other women. One had a profoundly disabled, non-verbal, autistic son; the other had a charming little dude with Down's Syndrome. I had two kids, had miscarried between their pregnancies, and thought I'd enjoy the time with other neighborhood moms.
The study was intolerable. The first woman had -- gee, how to put it? -- a theology that reeked of the ineffably bizarre. The mother of the boy with Down's was a new believer, and I'd been a Christian for about a decade. I'm an easygoing type of gal. I want to nurture other believers and help others learn the Bible. But I can't now, and couldn't then, tolerate hearing the first woman "confess" that she had "produced" her very ill son after having given Satan dominion over her uterus, and she was, having repented, now waiting for his complete physical healing of autism, tachycardia, epilepsy, profound intellectual deficit, and deafness. It would come, she said, just as the complete physical "healing" -- in her mind, the reversal and elimination of any sign of Down's Syndrome in the six-year-old boy -- would come, on this side of eternity, once the young mom "repented" of having turned the workings of her uterus, ovaries, and vagina over to the Devil. Little Michael's mom broke down sobbing, and I went prophetically angry. It may have even looked ballistic. Either way, it resulted in my being asked to never come to the study again.
This sort of hideous ignorance, masquerading as theology, is too common in the Church, the one place where loving God with both mind and heart ought to result in mercy, forgiveness, new starts, and a healthy grasp of reality. I doubt that the Crazy Demon-Obsessed People have much influence beyond whatever congregation they've floated into now, and the last I heard of my former neighbor is that her marriage collapsed, her son is still institutionalized, and she drifts from church to church. But the teaching leaves its impact on real women, real hearts, and real emotions. The Church would do well to model Christ and focus a whole lot less on women's uteruses and more on their hearts, minds, and souls.
Ushering people like Marshall off the media pulpit would be an excellent start.
Wednesday, February 24, 2010
Stephen Baldwin And The Applauding Masses
A debate rumbled on Moscow's Vision 2020 after this little gem was unearthed last week:
> "I am not happy about the way things are. I pray for President Obama every
> single day. But tell you what. Homey made this bed, now he has got to lay
> in it."
>
> Stephen Baldwin at the CPAC Convention (February 19, 2010)
Prediction: Any conservative political action movement that relies on C-list movie actors to articulate its principles and encourage its foot soldiers is one sadly destined to succeed in a country as divided and dumbed-down as this one. No, I'm not in an optimistic mood.
You didn't think I'd say "succeed," did you? I believe there's an enormous market for the kind of flip, vapid, ignorant comments we hear regularly from what used to be the Right's fringe, and the disrespect and thinly-veiled racism of referring to the President of the United States as "homey" is just the beginning.
It's hard for me to imagine any scenario under which a movement or organization would benefit from the identification of the "public" Stephen Baldwin as a foot soldier. But he and a lot of cool and famous dudes and dudettes are used to further agendas and positions more lasting than the venues from which they come. The political Right has no inherent obligation to be discerning. The Christian Right does. It's called discernment, and discernment is supposed to be part of the arsenal of every Christ follower.
But, of course, the gullibility of the Christian Right is legendary and at times apparently limitless. The "celebrity" conversion -- and I'm being generous here in attributing "celebrity" to the least articulate, least attractive, and least accomplished of the Four Baldwin Brothers -- is seen as some sort of ticket to the arena of cultural legitimacy, kind of like a feather in our collective cap, a cap we gleefully acquire and hope the other kids will find cool on Monday morning. A predictable spiritual vacuum -- and examples of gross analytical vapidity like Baldwin's -- results from an expression of faith that seeks cultural legitimacy from those it ought to instead lovingly deliver from a debauched culture.
When Christiandom exults in the endorsement of those who know little and practice less regarding the faith -- when the culturally-compromised Church treats conversion as a stamp of approval from the converted instead of as an intimate, joyous, and comprehensive spiritual rebirth -- it invites the kind of unabashed dumbness that makes "the President as homey" headlines. Being "on fire for the Lord," especially as a celebrity, shouldn't be synonymous with a scorched-earth, blistering, out-of-control approach to anything. But applause followed Baldwin's demonstration of doofus-ness; why shouldn't he continue?
Tragically, the Christian Right, in Hollywood or in the Beltway, stumbles all over itself to shove a microphone in the hands of celebs who say they're joined with Jesus, and intelligent people on the Right and on the Left, as well as apolitical evangelicals concerned with the witness of the Gospel, scratch their heads and wonder what kind of political movement would be so devoid of thoughtfulness that it would turn to the mumbling, dense, running-on-intellectual-fumes bit-part actor Stephen Baldwin for analysis?
I'm afraid that Stephen Baldwin, since his conversion to Christianity, has not exemplified very well the mandate to love the Lord Jesus with all of his mind. He's a couple of years past the "new believer" stage wherein such excesses are likely, and there's no real reason, evidently, why he should grow up -- as a man and as a Christian. Nothing in his acting career brings about the kudos and spotlight he enjoys now. If I were Stephen's pastor, I would pull him off the public stage and spend a great deal of time purging him of right-wing cultural "christiandom" and building in him instead a deep, abiding, intelligent faith not easily tickled by shifting winds of political doctrines -- particularly when the source of those doctrines come in from very nasty storm clouds gathered on the Right. But there appears to be no evidence of pastoring in Stephen's faith walk.
The point here is not Stephen Baldwin, although its his comment especially and his prominence in Right-wing circles both secular and spiritual in general, that provokes my analysis. What Stephen Baldwin thinks about anything is about as important as what I think about anything -- which is to say, not too terribly significant to the orderly running of the universe. But he's an example of much of what's very wrong with Christendom and politics, culture and civic duty, these days. Where he was crass, careless, and crude, though, others with much more power are, in the name of Christ and the doctrines that speak of him, vicious beyond measure. Next up, then -- the foul musings of a Virginia legislator on the relation between abortion and disability, comments uglier, I guarantee, than anything you'll hear in a very, very long time.
> "I am not happy about the way things are. I pray for President Obama every
> single day. But tell you what. Homey made this bed, now he has got to lay
> in it."
>
> Stephen Baldwin at the CPAC Convention (February 19, 2010)
Prediction: Any conservative political action movement that relies on C-list movie actors to articulate its principles and encourage its foot soldiers is one sadly destined to succeed in a country as divided and dumbed-down as this one. No, I'm not in an optimistic mood.
You didn't think I'd say "succeed," did you? I believe there's an enormous market for the kind of flip, vapid, ignorant comments we hear regularly from what used to be the Right's fringe, and the disrespect and thinly-veiled racism of referring to the President of the United States as "homey" is just the beginning.
It's hard for me to imagine any scenario under which a movement or organization would benefit from the identification of the "public" Stephen Baldwin as a foot soldier. But he and a lot of cool and famous dudes and dudettes are used to further agendas and positions more lasting than the venues from which they come. The political Right has no inherent obligation to be discerning. The Christian Right does. It's called discernment, and discernment is supposed to be part of the arsenal of every Christ follower.
But, of course, the gullibility of the Christian Right is legendary and at times apparently limitless. The "celebrity" conversion -- and I'm being generous here in attributing "celebrity" to the least articulate, least attractive, and least accomplished of the Four Baldwin Brothers -- is seen as some sort of ticket to the arena of cultural legitimacy, kind of like a feather in our collective cap, a cap we gleefully acquire and hope the other kids will find cool on Monday morning. A predictable spiritual vacuum -- and examples of gross analytical vapidity like Baldwin's -- results from an expression of faith that seeks cultural legitimacy from those it ought to instead lovingly deliver from a debauched culture.
When Christiandom exults in the endorsement of those who know little and practice less regarding the faith -- when the culturally-compromised Church treats conversion as a stamp of approval from the converted instead of as an intimate, joyous, and comprehensive spiritual rebirth -- it invites the kind of unabashed dumbness that makes "the President as homey" headlines. Being "on fire for the Lord," especially as a celebrity, shouldn't be synonymous with a scorched-earth, blistering, out-of-control approach to anything. But applause followed Baldwin's demonstration of doofus-ness; why shouldn't he continue?
Tragically, the Christian Right, in Hollywood or in the Beltway, stumbles all over itself to shove a microphone in the hands of celebs who say they're joined with Jesus, and intelligent people on the Right and on the Left, as well as apolitical evangelicals concerned with the witness of the Gospel, scratch their heads and wonder what kind of political movement would be so devoid of thoughtfulness that it would turn to the mumbling, dense, running-on-intellectual-fumes bit-part actor Stephen Baldwin for analysis?
I'm afraid that Stephen Baldwin, since his conversion to Christianity, has not exemplified very well the mandate to love the Lord Jesus with all of his mind. He's a couple of years past the "new believer" stage wherein such excesses are likely, and there's no real reason, evidently, why he should grow up -- as a man and as a Christian. Nothing in his acting career brings about the kudos and spotlight he enjoys now. If I were Stephen's pastor, I would pull him off the public stage and spend a great deal of time purging him of right-wing cultural "christiandom" and building in him instead a deep, abiding, intelligent faith not easily tickled by shifting winds of political doctrines -- particularly when the source of those doctrines come in from very nasty storm clouds gathered on the Right. But there appears to be no evidence of pastoring in Stephen's faith walk.
The point here is not Stephen Baldwin, although its his comment especially and his prominence in Right-wing circles both secular and spiritual in general, that provokes my analysis. What Stephen Baldwin thinks about anything is about as important as what I think about anything -- which is to say, not too terribly significant to the orderly running of the universe. But he's an example of much of what's very wrong with Christendom and politics, culture and civic duty, these days. Where he was crass, careless, and crude, though, others with much more power are, in the name of Christ and the doctrines that speak of him, vicious beyond measure. Next up, then -- the foul musings of a Virginia legislator on the relation between abortion and disability, comments uglier, I guarantee, than anything you'll hear in a very, very long time.
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