why fundamentalism is an atheistic response to pain (part III)

If some silly thing like a job, or a family, or Netflix kept you from lapping up the sweet wellspring of wisdom that was parts I and II, I’ve been trying to make the case that art—writing a novel, directing a movie or singing a song—is more helpful and truer to the biblical methods of dealing with pain than, say, writing a fundamentalist Handbook of Christian Apologetics.

In many ways, these are opposite strategies. The handbook is written to help us distance ourselves from our pain and look at it analytically. Art pulls us in deeper so we can experience the pain at a more conscious level.

A handbook writer starts out with the intellectual assumptions that God must be a certain way, that pain exists, and that the one needs to be justified in light of the other.

A painter just expresses his pain and assumes that God will provide the defense—that is, of course, if God is God. A musician that’s worth even half the liver in her belly doesn’t talk about God. She talks to God. Poets feel no pressure to speak reasonably in their moment of need. In fact, they’re liable to air all kinds of short-sided, irrational, even unfair grievances because they're only responsible for what’s honest, not what’s true.

Here’s an analogy from our bodies (if you’re medically trained, don’t correct any inaccuracies or it won’t work). I understand there are certain types of back injuries where our body’s first impulse is to engage the muscles around the injury to protect us from feeling the pain fully. But eventually this becomes counterproductive as the tightening and inflammation becomes the source of a more enduring pain long after the original injury would have healed.  What we really need to do at that point is learn to relax those muscles so that we can really feel the pain and let the healing process work more directly. 

I say the artist's method is more true to the Bible because, anywhere other than a handbook writer’s desk, the Bible pretty obviously isn’t a collection of logical assertions about God but of family myths, and petty songs of tribal vengeance, and morally questionable parables, and seemingly off topic sidebars, and poems. Lots of poems.

And just as good art isn’t a random hodge-podge of colors or sounds but a creative use of the rules and boundaries of a particular medium, the Hebrew culture that generated our Bible developed structures and forms for their poems that helped them deal with their pain more effectively.

For instance, the poems of the book of Lamentations, written shortly after everything the Israelites knew was demolished, killed or shipped off to exile, are written in acrostic. With the first word of each line corresponding to one of 22 letters in the Hebrew alphabet, the lamenter was free to make whatever raw and sometimes venomous grievance he or she would like to make toward God. But just as the alphabet comes to an end, so too must the lament.

We’ve all known the mourner who refuses to go on whatever other love and blessings are poured into her. Or the former jock who insists on not showing gratitude for his stable job and beautiful family at present because sometime in the past he “could’a been a contender.” We can be just as narcissistic about using our pain to gather attention around ourselves as we can about hoarding blessings. The lamenter isn’t encouraged to deny her pain, but she isn't allowed to identify with it indefinitely, either. This structure provided a lamenter a means of addressing her pain without becoming unhealthily co-dependent on it.

The Psalms of lament often end with a line of praise and thanksgiving that always looks a little out of place in an otherwise ugly string of complaints and accusations (E.g. Ps. 13:5-6).  These lines are more than just token happy endings. They provide a way for the Psalmist to acknowledge, “However raw my feelings are right now, I will still acknowledge that this lament takes place within a relationship that is more enduring than my current emotional state. So I will end with a word of praise even when I don’t feel like it, because I know there will be other times when I do feel like it.” 

This kind of directness is only possible if, beneath the pain of the moment, the poet has a deeper trust in the integrity of the relationship surrounding the words.

My wife has committed to me for better or worse. I wear evidence of that commitment around my finger and keep paperwork for it safely filed away. So around her, I might spout out all kinds of hair-brained nonsense in a moment of frustration, nonsense that I might think to filter out in the context of a lesser relationship. The more secure our relationship, the more she is able to suspend any judgment on my temporary irrationality or any fear that this might be a permanent threat to our relationship.

It goes both ways, of course. I have a responsibility not to let frustration and accusation become my normal modes of relating to her, and surely I’ll need to become the more mature and rational one at some other point when she is having a moment.

The covenant secured relationship that we’ve made becomes the kind of container for unedited speech that a shaky, superficial relationship can never be.

So people are arguably at their most faithful when they're comfortably expressing their frustration and doubt to God. 

For all this, you’ll notice that the handbook writer will usually sell more books than the poet. Logically Why-ing away pain will always be a sexier alternative to engaging it head on.

But you’ll notice that at the end of the day, when the handbook writer has dried his final sheet and closed up his ink well, when all arguments have been exhausted, questions settled, the victim stripped of any reason to gripe, no one actually comes away from the ordeal with the responsibility to actually do something about the pain.

The fundamentalist handbook writer is similar to the atheist. He either believes that (1) God does not exist or that (2) God is not capable of doing stuff. Otherwise, he would not feel such enormous pressure to make God's case.

By way of contrast, the Psalmist, by not providing any explanation or justification, has put the ball in God’s court to actually do something about the pain. No questions have been answered and no grievances settled, so it’s incumbent solely upon God to come through on the back end.

The Psalmist doesn’t seek answers for pain but healing.

suffering like an artist (Part II)

In the first part of this blog series, I talked about how intellectual or rational responses to the problem of pain, even if they’re good responses, are ultimately unsatisfying because we are more than just intellectual creatures. That’s not to imply that there is a satisfying alternative. But what other resources should our faith give us to push through suffering?

As I write, I’m fixated on the song, Silence, by Matisyahu. To feel the full gravity, you really have to listen to it, but I’ll provide some pertinent lines for the time-challenged.

True to the Hebrew tradition of candid, unedited prayer, the singer lifts up words that are at once indicting of himself and of God. Authenticity before the Holy One is valued over religious propriety. Closed, intellectual answers to the problem of suffering are neither offered, nor are they pursued.

 If it should turn out that he was really just praying at the ceiling, this effort to “shine a warmth into eternity” is doomed to fail in a world where “all is vanity” (Eccl. 1:2) and a universe where the cold, chaotic laws of thermodynamics are unrelenting. He risks the prayer anyways. It’s on God to prove that it was not in vain.

This is not a rational way of dealing with pain. But what cancer patient or grieving mother could give two damns about what’s rational?

To stubbornly “shine warmth” into a universe that tends toward cold is not a levelheaded action prompted by a calm assessment of possible outcomes. It is an act of defiance against chaos. It’s a mortal cry that if there does not exist a bridge between a future where “we’ll dance like flames” and a present where “I’m just a candle trying to stay lit in this windy night,” then I will insist on building such a bridge. I will begin to build even if my own love is the only cabling and my faith the only anchorage. I will leave it up to God whether hope should prove a worthy deck to get us across.

He is pitting love against entropy to see who wins. I don’t have to offer a defense for you, God. If you are God, prove it.  “[I] bring my heart to an invisible king with a hope one day you might answer me, so I pray, ‘Don’t you abandon me.’”

The song offers no explanation for the “problem of pain,” because, in fact, the song is not about suffering. The song is his suffering. It is his suffering not talked about at a distance but completely felt with music as the medium that allows him to access it fully.

Explanations, on the other hand, are like opiates for the soul. We dab the topical anesthetic, Explainitall, onto our hearts and escape into our heads in hopes that the pain will have gone away by the time our chest comes to. But it’s a deceptive solution. We’re numbed to the pain, but its root cause hasn’t been dealt with at all.

The art method is very much opposite that of philosophy. An artist assumes that if pain is going to happen, then we can’t get out of it but only through it.

This is hard to understand in our therapeutic culture where rosy praise songs and happy-ending apologetics are written by Christians who seem to want to act as veritable publicists for God, and we might be confused by the biblical faithful who are typically the ones lamenting the loudest; but avoidance of pain is a sign of unfaith. Faith is what gives us the courage to drink that foul cup without a chaser.  

Nevertheless, an honest artist is hard pressed to lay all responsibility for suffering in the lap of God and leave it at that. Can one ever honestly level such a charge at God without simultaneously indicting oneself?

“Your silence kills me…”

Matisyahu says. True enough. But he knows himself well enough to know,

“…I wouldn't have it any other way.”

Do I actually want to know what God thinks about things? Do I actually want God to offer an evaluation of my own silence toward the poor and oppressed? toward my own apathy in the face of injustice? toward my own negligence of the orphan and the stranger? Do I actually want to allow God that level of intrusiveness upon my own aims and motives?

No. If I’m truly honest with myself, all things being equal, I wouldn’t have it any other way.

There is, of course, a heavy price to pay for this silence. Not just for us. For God. What does a parent do, when she can’t bear the sight of her child’s suffering nor can she coerce the child’s affairs enough to avoid it? That parent dies.

More on that in Part III of this blog.

suffering and why answering 'Why' is not enough (Part I)

If God is both powerful and good, why do bad things still happen?

This is such an unrelenting question in the life of faith, theologians have given it its own name: theodicy.

In 1994 an Evangelical publishing company released the Handbook of Christian Apologetics, a book which advertises itself as having “concise” and “witty” answers to all the big questions, does God exist? providence versus free will? and of course, the mother of all big questions given above. Not unlike a telemarketer’s script, this marvel of peaceful, easy certitude provides a user-friendly flowchart for each section (E.g. If your opponent mentions the randomness of the evolutionary process, talk about the complexity, pointing to intentionality, behind of human cell structure; if they argue that such a structure could randomly develop, given enough chances, here is the statistical improbability of this, even if the Earth is 4.5 billion years old, etc.).

It’s in handbook form, I presume, so that we can quickly reference it and beat back the accusing inquiries of those conniving “secularists,” but still thick enough that, verbal argument notwithstanding, it can be used to beat them back in a different sort of way.  I humbly confess that there was a time, when I was first figuring out the extent to which I would own my faith as an adult, where I remember finding it convenient that someone had finally laid out these answers in such an easy-to-use format, such that my then fragile theological system should never have to be troubled by unpleasant outliers—questions unanswered and data that doesn’t fit. It was fantastic! Simple, untroubled certitude for only $16.75 on Amazon.  

So why, then, did I still struggle with my faith? It would not have been so deflating if the “answers” that this handbook gave me eventually proved to be bad. I could always just find better answers. The real problem was not that the “handbook” gave all invalid arguments. It was that it gave many valid answers, and I still wasn’t satisfied. The logic of it worked out, so why was my faith life still such a struggle?

I still felt used and unlovable when a girlfriend would break up with me. I still spiraled into existential crisis when it became unavoidably clear that my hairline was, in fact, receding. I was still bothered by the amount of poverty and violence in the world.

Perhaps the problem is not finding an answer to the Why question but the expectation that an answer to the Why question will be enough.

The first thing that both “believer” and skeptic have in common when they bring up theodicy, is they both anticipate (albeit, one more optimistic than the other) that this is primarily an intellectual question, so an adequate intellectual answer would satisfy it.

The second thing they have in common is that, having found a rational answer to the Why question, neither will be completely satisfied, because…

…the third thing, they are both likely searching for far more than an intellectual answer to an intellectual question.

Here is what I mean. We all already know the standard, prosaic answers to the theodicy question. E.g.

- God creates free will, and where free will exists, so does the opportunity for evil.

- Love can’t exist where hate is not an option, nor beauty without ugliness, nor pleasure without pain, blah, blah, blah... 

These calm, analytical responses, usually offered from comfortably upholstered armchairs in climate-controlled offices, continue to be as reasonable today as ever.  The problem is not that very rationale answers to the Why question don’t exist. The problem is that they do exist, but so long as there is much more to the human creature that experiences suffering than just the rational self, these answers remain unsatisfying in our actual moment of pain and crisis. 

If I can try to fit into a blog paragraph the subject of entire tenured careers, the problem of “theodicy” can’t really be addressed in the modern Western world until we recognize how we’ve unwittingly restricted ourselves to valuing one aspect of our humanness—reason—over against any other. When the Enlightenment swept across Euro-America a few centuries ago, it was unofficially decided that the life of the rational intellect was the only part of life worth paying attention to. “Human” was defined as that creature which could reason. Filtered out of this definition was any concern for the aesthetic self, the emotional self, the intuitive self, the poetic self, the story-telling self, and most importantly, the loving self (if you assume, as I do, that love isn’t love if it is strictly rational).

That puts us in a strange position now—just starting to come off the enlightenment buzz but still grasping for a more adequate understanding of what makes us human—when we set the theodicy question in terms of reason and logic.  It’s not that reasonable, logical answers don’t exist. It’s that they do exist, and it hasn't proven to be enough. We’ve heard those answers. Yet, here we are, still asking the question.

If this is the central question, it’s remarkable that in the entirety of the scriptures, never is there offered up an “apology” or rational defense for how a loving God can allow suffering to go on in the world in the vein of the Handbook of Christian Apologetics. But no one in any of our scriptures ever claims to have any such answer.

I take that back. The four “friends” of Job have all kinds of answers, the very fact of which makes them stock characters whose words come out cheap and forgettable. Trivial people saying trivial things. However well-reasoned their defense, however well their system fits together, it will be forgotten as hastily as it was devised, not because their logic doesn’t work but because logic doesn’t work. We don’t have bad answers that have been proven bad. We have good answers that have been proven insufficient. We have reasonable answers but reasonable answers hardly matter one iota in the face of real suffering.

So, in the second part of this blog coming next week, I will try to grapple with the problem of pain in a way that is not irrational, hopefully, but that does not fixate on rational answers at the expense of all other facets of what it means to be human. I’ll try to stay truer to the method of Jesus and his Jewish roots which prefers stories to arguments, open-ended parables to closed logic, includes poetry as well as prose and, most of all, seeks a Who more than a why.

See you there.

praying for courage instead of comfort

If our prayers so often don’t get answered, why do we continue to pray?

Since most of us can cite those instances that seemed to indicate that prayers don’t get answered and those that convinced us that they do, is it just a numbers game?  Do we just toss up a high volume of pitches in hopes that God might bat about .300? Are “believers” just people conditioned to interpret the occasional fluky fielding error as a line drive to the gap?

The problem is that the question itself—“Do prayers get answered?”—limits our imagination for how God might be at work. Whatever the response (and there are only two choices), God can only come off as a ‘cosmic butler’ who can solve a few, but not all, of our problems with good-willed, if bumbling, incompetence or a disinterested sovereign who will occasionally deign to be our benefactor if it reflects well on the crown. The question assumes that requests often don’t get answered because God is either incompetent or indifferent but doesn’t question whether getting requests answered is the primary value of prayer.  

But in our better thinking, we know that the primary image of God does not come to us from a bellhop’s luggage rack or a sovereign’s crown but a convict’s cross. The cross represents God’s refusal to coerce events, for better or for worse, with a snap of the divine fingers.

The creator likely has the ability to micromanage the spin of particles and the dance of galaxies, but the cost of doing so would be that creation would no longer have independent existence so much as it would be an extension of God. And our God isn’t narcissistic like that. If God’s intention for creating in the first place was that there be an arena where spontaneous, reciprocal love of the other could exist, then it’s not that God simply can’t answer prayers that request such dictatorial intervention; it’s that God can’t. To concede even the smallest request—to take over the wheel and redirect a car or suspend an avalanche—would be to give up the project of creation altogether.

While this often makes creation a risky and unpredictable enterprise, we should think long and hard as to whether we would prefer the alternative. Hitler experimented with that, attempting to solve the problems of creation by much more expedient means, progressing us along by force and eliminating that which he believed shouldn’t be.

The cross evidences nothing if not God’s ultimate refusal to solve all potential problems with this sort of force. It’s the result of God’s fierce commitment to creation, all of it, without remainder. But also, it’s God’s insistence that no one should suffer the consequences of an unpredictable creation by themselves.

And this is where prayer comes in.

Completing creation nonviolently and non-coercively is by far the longer route. Jesus has the scars to prove that (resorting to a military legion of angels must be a constant temptation in the divine life).

We, on the other hand, are a power-hungry people with grand visions of how we would have it could we muster the power to ‘fix’ creation through forceful means.

Prayer is where we give up these visions and re-align ourselves with God’s chosen means.

Prayer is both saying to God and hearing back from God, “I recognize that we have chosen the more difficult path, so I trust that we are in this thing together whatever stones may be thrown our way by a world that doesn’t yet get it.”

We pray, then, because those who walk the harder path need to lean on each other. Beneath the cross, it makes no more sense to speak of whether a prayer was “answered” than to speak of whether a step or a breath was answered. Perhaps any decent response to this kind of question should be evaluated not in whether it is “right” or “satisfying” but in whether it gives one the courage to go on walking the path and praying.

This answer may sound unsatisfying at first blush because we humans don’t often think to ask for courage. What we really want are answers. We don’t desire that our mettle be tested or that an unsettled world challenge us to act with more valor, more compassion, more life than we’d previously thought ourselves capable. We want settled stability and ease of mind. Unanswered questions imply that something is unsettled and unstable, that there are loose ends that haven’t been tied off, unspeakable entropies spiraling into oblivion.

So it’s true that aligning ourselves with God’s means of making creation fruitful is unlikely to result in a life that is comfortable and assured. But there is more at stake here. We’ll still certainly want to avoid suffering and won’t seek it out arbitrarily, but how differently we might be able to interpret the grief, and suffering and ultimately death that we face if we have spent our time praying:

Lord, give me a lifetime not of assurance but of yearning,

not of ease in my mind but of fire in my bones,

not of comfort in myself but of joy in my neighbor

And if you will reassure me,

Reassure me that I’ve fought the good fight for something that matters.

If you will put me at ease,

Ease my fear of a lukewarm life devoid of passion and purpose.

If you will comfort me,

Comfort me that I will not find my repose while my neighbor still suffers.

Give me courage to live out the desire deeper than my desires—

the desire of my deepest self—

that would be with you on a cross before it would be alone in comfort…

until there are no more crosses.

worse than fire and sulfur

While preparing a Maundy Thursday sermon on Jesus washing the disciples’ feet in John 13, I had an inkling to start writing about what I think the final judgment will be like—a topic that has all but consumed much of North American Christianity (no pun intended). But first I have to justify why I feel bold enough to venture such a speculation.

Especially because, no doubt, the judgment obsessed will find my depiction of the last judgment to be too namby-pamby for their tastes, and will start checking the skies for lightning bolts to see where I am located. No worries. Personally, I find my depiction far more terrifying than the tired old fire and sulfur that they dream up.  And I’ll just respond that, if I’m wrong, and this is too namby-pamby, I’ll face the music when I get there. I’m just not too worried about that. Because, rather than freely speculate, I’ve always looked to Jesus of Nazareth—Jesus the outcast-embracer, Jesus the leper-healer, Jesus the sinner-befriender, Jesus the cross die-er— to figure out what God is like, I’ve just never really been afraid of what he’ll do to me if I’m wrong about stuff like this.

In fact, I’ll be so bold as to say that it’s kind of a catch-22 from God’s end, as well, not because anyone “has anything on” God but because of what he sort of brought on himself by so consistently relating to us as he has. If “Bible believing” Christians are again listening for thunder, at this point, I’ll just gently remind them that biblical characters from Moses to the psalmists be playin’ this card all the time, appealing to God’s mercy and reminding God of his own reputation and standards so as to avoid the lightning bolt. For example, in Psalm 6:1-5 the writer pleads to God “Don’t rebuke me in your anger or discipline me in your wrath,” reminding him that he is also a God of “steadfast love” even suggesting that it’s not in God’s best interest to strike him down, anyway, because “in death there is no remembrance of you; in Sheol who can give you praise?” Another instance, when God has finally had it with the Israelites in the desert (Numbers 14) and is ready to “strike them with pestilence an disinherit them” (v. 12), Moses intercedes for the people by reciting a standard litany about who God is (v. 18), then specifically reminds God to “forgive the iniquity of this people according to the greatness of your steadfast love” (notice that in v. 19 he slyly leaves out the part about God also being a God of justice who “by no means clears the guilty”). This is transparently manipulative behavior by a child who is trying to wiggle out of punishment because he ultimately believes that his parent’s mercy will overrule his parent’s sense of justice. What’s really remarkable, is that he’s right (vv. 20-24). In kind of the opposite way, Jonah tellingly recognizes that God is “a gracious God and merciful, slow to anger, and abounding in steadfast love, ready to relent from punishing” (Jonah 4:2) but says this with regret, wishing that it were not so because of the wrath and hellfire he wants God to rain down on the heathen Ninevites.  

See, if I’m being completely blasphemous here, then of course God is free to do with me whatever God wills…kind of. The conflict is that God can only strike me down in an outburst of violence at the expense of his entire reputation that he worked and suffered so much to cultivate here on Earth. God can only strike me down for not praising or worshipping properly at the expense of what makes God so worship-able and praiseworthy in the first place (alright, now I’m checking the skies, but I persist nonetheless), unfathomable forbearance and mercy. A god who strikes down dissidents left and right is certainly fear-able and obey-able but can never be loveable—love being the one thing God wants from us more than anything else (Matthew 22:36-39).

In the absence of love, there would be nothing stopping God from sending a lightning bolt right through my presumptuous mouth right now, as we speak. In that sense, God is completely free. The problem, though, is that love forces us to suffer each other and put up with each other in a way that wouldn’t be necessary were we only trying to fulfill a loveless legal standard. Over time, we even begin to trust that those who love us aren’t simply doing it on a whim in those moments when we please them, but rather, their love comes from some place deeper and more sustaining, perhaps even a place tangled up in their character and integrity.

Imagine, if my own mother and father who have consistently loved and nurtured and supported me for 27 years, making huge personal sacrifices to do it, suddenly turned an about-face one day, in full possession of their faculties mind you, and said, “We’ve decided we hate you because you’re a loser. We wish you had never been born. And we’d much prefer to have you shipped off and tortured somewhere else than have to look at your ugly face anymore.” Now take that event, increase its unexpectedness to the nth degree, and I think you have a close approximation to what much of North American Christianity supposes God will be like on the last day. Never mind Jesus who said, “Whoever has seen me has seen the Father” (John 14:9) and “I do not judge anyone who hears my words and does not keep them, for I came not to judge the world, but to save the world” (John 13:47); never mind that our only model for God is someone who would rather die himself than easily call down 12 legions of angels to slay his enemies (Mt. 26:53); never mind that God gets up super early, before most Starbucks are even open yet (I used to be a barista—trust, it’s ridiculously early), to again lift the sun up into the sky and rain waters from the heavens so that plants can spread and blossom and animals can bask in its glow (see Psalm 104); never mind that when our lungs are able to inhale, God has consistently breathed the breath of life into them (see Genesis 2:7); it seems that many are still dead set and even lustful after the idea that God will be ready for some bloodshed when all is said and done.

But assuming it’s better for Christians to look to Jesus, and not to their own harshest neuroses and projected insecurities, when speculating about the world’s future, here’s how I’m envisioning the final judgment, so help me God.

I’ll be sitting in a chair, plush but a little too big for me, before an even grander throne. One glance at that glorious face, and I’ll instantly know beyond any doubt that I’m a worm. Illuminated by God’s full, uncontained light, my eyes will wonder down to the floor, then to my feet, then my hands. I’ll see in the starkest contrast the reality of my life, which was always there but to which I was always able to mentally fortify myself before. Aside from the more obvious sins that I already recognized as sins, I’ll see with crystal clarity that my relationship to God’s creation was basically parasitic, that what I considered my greatest acts of kindness and charity really amounted to so much ego scratching,  that the relationships which I called loving were essentially self-serving.

And the Glory of all glories, the Lord of all lords, at whose beckoning stars burst and heavens crumble, will slowly stroll over to me and look me straight in the eye. I’ll want to look away from the white-hot glow of that face, but somehow I won’t be able. Seeing that the verdict is approaching, I’ll hear my dry mouth shout, “Please! Send me to the fire-y furnace. I’ll breathe sulfur! I’ll shovel granite! I swear! It’s all I’m worth! Just please don’t make me gaze on your glory any longer!”

But not uttering a single word, the alpha and omega, the Lord of hosts, the maker of all that is seen and unseen, will wrap a towel around his waist, kneel down, and wash the feet of this self-serving, parasitic, knave. And I’ll have to watch him do it. And I’ll have to deal with the terror and the pain of knowing that all along it should’ve been me washing his.

the cosby show, the chappelle show, and the importance of satire in the church

As a white male from an almost comically white background, I’ll necessarily walk on eggshells through some of this. Understand, though, that this is not a commentary on the intentions of either comedian or their impact on the black community, which I can’t speak to, but is rather about their respective impacts on my own demographic growing up. I believe this is analogous to many questions about cultural communication and generational shift now pressing on the church.

I draw these two comedians into comparison because, in two very different ways, they have both either chosen to participate in or have been enveloped by central roles in the ongoing race dialogue in this country.

Cosby, who was already known as one of the most wholesome and successful comedians of the early 80’s, became a household name with is portrayal of Dr. Huxtable, a family oriented sweater lover, nearly devoid of a rough edge. As a public figure, he has since been an outspoken critic of black entertainers, athletes, and even private families for what he sees as not taking responsibility for the problems facing the African American community and perpetuating negative stereotypes.

Chappelle, on the other hand, made countless well-to-do, suburban mothers squirm by writing and starring in the cultish, marijuana film, “Half Baked,” then sent them into apoplexy with one of the most successful (though shortest lived) sketch comedy shows of all time, “Chappelle Show,” the vast majority of whose sketches directly concerned the issue of race.

It’s very unlikely that the two would ever enjoy a beer together, although I’m aware of one occasion where Chappelle stood up for Cosby when Cosby was taking heat for his commentaries on the black community.

Whether or not this was intentional (again, I can’t comment on the intentions behind the show but only its effect on my community), for the better part of the eighties and well into the nineties, “The Cosby Show” brought the very wholesome, very relatable experiences of an upper middle-class, African American family into the living rooms of white suburbanites. No doubt, there was very little “gimmick” here, the show was mostly reflective of the real life, middle-class experience that Cosby spoke of in his earlier stand-up routines. A lot can be said for the family-friendly warmth of the Huxtables and the show had every right not to openly approach the issue of racial stereotypes (I don’t want to be heard as saying that a show featuring a minority family needs necessarily discuss racism), but the result of this silence in my white-washed suburb was that the show basically posited a family that we could relate to within our own cultural paradigm without having to confront our uglier, if disavowed, images of the other culture. In other words, the show helped me relate to the Huxtables alright but actually did very little to distinguish the real cultural differences that exist between African and Euro-Americans from the pop-culture stereotypes that simply exist in that ethereal space called "the society" (no one every really knows who is responsible for them). To be sure, these stereotypes weren’t given to me by my family or really anyone in particular, and I knew enough to disavow them, but their anonymous origin did nothing to hide their presence in the recesses of my subconscious (and I don’t suspect that I was the only one).

However offended some might be by the show’s over-the-top disregard for boundaries and political correctness (and I’m aware that those still shaking their heads in disgust are unlikely to get this point), I believe that Chappelle did something for me and my generation of white suburbanites, that the Huxtables could never do: rather than constructing an example of a family that is far removed from all the worst racial stereotypes that exist in our culture, Chappelle deconstructed those stereotypes head-on, satirically drawing them out into the open and pushing them to their outlandish conclusion. Whereas the effect of “The Cosby Show” on the national dialogue on race was indirect and constructive, providing an example of a family that didn’t match the stereotypes that the white middle-class had constructed, the effect of “Chappelle Show” was direct and deconstructive,[1] working from within the stereotypes themselves.

Ironically, rather than simply constructing characters that break certain stereotypes, Chappelle used Clayton Bigsby, the blind, black, white-supremacist and the self-portrayed, Wayne Brady, the black guy whom white people love (so long as they’re ignorant of his seamy night life), to reveal the stereotypes for what they were. Stupid. And though it became a little too common for frat boys everywhere to quote even the worst lines with presumed impunity, we white kids always sensed (right or wrong) that we were "in" on the joke and that the joke was on us. The running joke, underlying almost every sketch was that any group would ever be stupid enough to hold, however intellectually disavowed, such an absurd image of another group.

Clearly, many in the black community found Chappelle’s humor to be a step backward, not forward, but I believe the overwhelming result of the show in the white community was to ever-distance African Americans from the stereotypes portrayed. Such is the nature of satire (and this is why there have always been those that “don’t get it”) that the joke is never on the stereotyped but is rather on anyone who would give those stereotypes credence. The more outlandish Tyrone Biggums or Leonard Washington, the more the stereotypes were “shown up” for the foolishness that they were. I obviously can’t speak to whether it was appropriate or inappropriate for some in the African American community to still find these sketches deeply hurtful. As is always the case with satire, the healing power of pushing a certain hurtful experience to the limit of palatability can be quickly lost with just a step beyond that limit. It’s a risk. One could also argue that, with racism, we’re speaking of something so stupid that it ought to deconstruct itself with no need for offensive comedy. But sadly it never does. From Voltaire to Chappelle, history has shown that silence does not deconstruct bigotries. What does deconstruct bigotries is voicing them out loud and bringing them to their absurd conclusion and doing it in such a way that those responsible for constructing them in the first place are not put on the defensive but can anonymously “get in on the joke.”  

Now for what I’m actually qualified to speak on. I believe that the church is in need of a similarly deconstructive dialogue when dealing with Gen X and Millenials (far and away the most underrepresented demographics). There is a reason that Chappelle Show won an audience with 16-30 year olds but was essentially lost on their parents. Irony, sarcasm and satire are primary language forms in this generational culture. If you’re unsure of what I mean, do a quick survey of the Facebook memes posted by all your friends in this demographic.

I believe this is not unrelated to the fact that this age group is having to adapt to a pluralistic world in a way that their parents did not. Many of the latter spent their formative years in either a culturally homogeneous small town or a self-contained urban/suburban environment. Sure, they had all heard rumors and stories about these people called Buddhists and Muslims in some far off land, but so long as they were still far off, because beliefs are always communally constructed, we could learn about their different worldviews but still be fairly confident that “ours” was the “official one.” The situation is very different for later generations for whom Muslims and Buddhists are flesh and blood human beings sitting next to them in the lecture hall. Being face to face with someone forces us to grapple with their innate dignity as human persons in a way we never have to so long as their existence is primarily mythological. Similarly, not so long ago, “we,” the heterosexual majority, had heard rumors and stories that there were gays and lesbians somewhere out there, but so long as those in “our” neighborhoods and households remained in the closet, “we” could all be satisfied that “our” sexuality was the “official one.” Anything else was a lifestyle choice of sheer deviance. It’s a different story for the generations of the heterosexual majority who know many out-of-the-closet gay and lesbian people whom they have to grapple with as real persons.

Earnest speech can only come from within the cultural paradigm that I earnestly occupy. What the language forms of sarcasm, irony, and satire do for us, which earnest speech never can, is they allow us to distance ourselves from those cultural paradigms, themselves, and critique them.

My point is that, where whole generations have left the church because they could find no resonance in its theological paradigms, the church cannot simply posit new paradigms without having an honest discussion about what was inadequate with the former ones. Here is what this looks like in practice. When I’m having a conversation over coffee with a Millenial who has left his or her Southern Baptist upbringing, it’s one thing for me to construct a picture of a nonviolent God who is present in Jesus on the cross, in solidarity with the suffering world, rather than a “divine child abuser” who put him there in the first place to vicariously punish some human sinfulness. But where I’m really going to earn a hearing with this Millenial is where I explicitly call out the divine child abuser for what he is rather than trying to skirt around him like he never existed. To win a hearing with someone deeply scarred by that pseudo-theology, I actually need to say, out loud, “You can’t worship a divine child abuser? I can’t worship a divine child abuser either.” If I don’t satirize that pseudo-god, and only posit other positive images of God, how can this person ever be sure that the tyrant of their youth isn’t still lurking somewhere in the background? Even accepting my new content for the word, “God,” they’ll be forever waiting for the other theological boot to drop. And what’s true of our need for strictly theological deconstruction is perhaps even more true of our need for socio-political deconstruction. “You can’t worship the Jesus of corporate capitalism? Neither can I. And here’s why.”

Albert Einstein once told a group of secondary school math students “Don’t worry about your difficulties in mathematics. I assure you mine are still greater.” In the same way, I often tell those on the fringes or completely outside the church, “Don’t worry about your critiques of the Christian Church. I assure you mine are still greater.” Deconstruction is essentially a truth-telling event. The old testament prophets could not paint a picture of a better future on God’s holy mountain without first deconstructing the idolatries in the valley of the present (See Micah 3-4 or Isaiah 1-2). From the perspective of the idolater, idol-busting is nothing other than confession. Only when we in the church can openly confess all the idolatries of which we are guilty, can we introduce others to the real God of Jesus Christ.

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[1] ‘Deconstructive’, in this philosophical sense, means a good and necessary process by which any hierarchy that is less than ideal (anything that has no permanent value) that would pose as the ideal (something that has permanent value) is called out and stripped away for being an imposter. In this sense, abolition and women’s suffrage were essentially deconstructive events. This term should not be confused with “destruction,” which in popular usage is always a bad thing.