they told you not to read this blog about carrie underwood, your response silenced every unbeliever

You might have seen this article, qpolitical.com, making its rounds through the interwebs. The article witnesses (creates?) the controversy in no uncertain terms with a headline that reads like a flashing alarm signal to insecure Christians, “They Told Carrie Underwood Not To Praise Jesus In Public…”

Outrage. Scandal. Irony and ignominy. Our officially “inclusive” secular culture coming full circle. “Inclusive as long as you’re not a Christian,” let it be said. Make haste good Christian brothers and sisters! Let us already be mounting our counterattack!…

…Except that, EXCEPT THAT, you click on the article to see who it is, this loathsome anti-Christ who would launch such an assault on such a sweet, innocent (and not coincidentally attractive) poster child for old fashioned values, and it’s as if the foe evaporates from beneath your finger tips. No particular adversary is named, not even a record company or entertainment entity. The article contains no hint of who might’ve told Carrie such a thing, just some purposely vague and unverifiable statements that “her new single, ‘Something In The Water’ has caused quite a bit of controversy” and that she “has come under heavy scrutiny by not only the pop industry but also the country music industry at times” (note the Freudian revelation buried in the panicky syntax here: that the scrutiny comes “not only” from the godless “pop industry,” which should apparently be no surprise, “but also” that great beachhead of Christian values, the “country music industry!”).

I have little patience for researching media contrived controversy. Fortunately, it’s been done already by this article, Carrie Underwood: Not a Single Atheist Cares What You Sing, which lists more articles on the subject with titles like:

Atheists Viciously Attack Carrie Underwood’s New Song, Want it Banned

Carrie Underwood’s Brand New Song Making Atheists Mad as Hell

This Famous Music Star has a New Song Out, Atheists are Going to Hate it. Listen Here

Same thing across the board. All self-identified conservative sources. All quote Carrie Underwood’s response to her opponents. None quote or even identify the opponents, themselves.

These Don Quixotes seem to be having an argument with the wind.  

Now there are few things more embarrassing than trying to pick a fight when no one cares, but I don’t write this because I very much care what they told or didn’t tell Carrie Underwood. I have a bigger point in mind.

The effect of such ambiguity should be obvious. It creates a perpetual opponent. An opposition who was never born and so can never be defeated. A godless specter who goes by imprecise names like “secularism,” who always floats transcendently above the level of concrete things and so haunts and imposes its will on all of them. In short, a bogeyman.

The whole thing interests me insofar as it is a microcosm for the function that the other plays in our popular discourse.  The “they”—whoever it is that is so fiercely antagonizing Carrie Underwood—could very easily be replaced by “Muslims,” “gays,” “Obama,” “Mexicans,” “Welfare Queens,” or whatever intimidating other we find conveniently close at hand (it’s not just accidental that these otherwise unrelated examples are so frequently named within the same breath).

Hazy bogeyman with no concrete existence in reality are especially useful for their dexterity and their interchangeability. For instance, Slavoj Zizek, in Interrogating the Real, has pointed out how American misogyny can cloak itself under both the narrative of the lazy, uneducated (and therefore birth control-less) “Welfare Queen” who keeps having children that then need to be fed and clothed by the tax payer and the narrative of the college educated, professional woman who uses birth control, delays family, and therefore, spurns traditional values. And I wouldn’t be the first to wonder how “Mexicans,” according to the racist dogmas of our time can be simultaneously “lazy” and “stealing our jobs.” It’s perfectly common place for these narratives to be held together with no sense of contradiction or paradox.

Bogeymen (or bogeywomen, as the case may be) are apparently damned if they do and damned if they don’t.         

It’s no original insight for me to say that there is no quicker way to rally a crowd to your own ideology or agenda than to consolidate enemies with them. And the energy that you galvanize by using this common trick will be perpetually loyal to your cause so long as the others in question never have to show their faces. To show their faces would be to reveal themselves as vulnerable—human, even. And all the loyalty that is gathered in opposition to them will be lost. The more anonymous the bogeyman, the more invulnerable. The more invulnerable, the more eagerly and enduringly your following will want to oppose them. There is no more convenient enemy for a demagogue to have than an immortal enemy. And there is no enemy more immortal than one who never lived in the first place.

This creates a preliminary step if we’re to take the commands of real Jesus (as distinct from his ideological phantom) seriously in our bogeyman-making context. Before we can love our enemies, we need to first pluck them out of the spectral plane and place them on the level of the actual. Then there will actually be someone there to love.   

purpose - quitting the cult of endless distractions

As far as we know, bison do not care about birthdays. Even seasoned farmers do not report having ever seen their Clydesdales keeping calendars. Halibut do not go on holidays.

In all of the animal kingdom, humans alone feel that the days should not just be allowed to pass by anonymously, that time should be marked somehow.

Perhaps it’s because we alone are self-reflective enough to realize that our days do not just go on indefinitely, that for each of us, new days will stop coming at some point. Perhaps we seek to mark important benchmarks in time—confirmations, Christenings, and quinceañeras—because we alone have contemplated death and so have felt an urgency about life.

That’s not to say that foreseeing the precariousness of our place in the universe always causes us to “make the most” of our time. Very often it can do just the opposite.  Existential awareness becomes existential dread. It takes a very honest person to fess up to their existential dread and exhibit a classic mental breakdown. But I suspect that most of us deal with it by the more socially acceptable means of constant distraction—endless queues of TV series and sporting events on our DVR, mindless shopping excursions, never-ending improvements to our homes, BuzzFeed after Vine after Tumblr.

A recent study conducted by University of Virginia and Harvard researchers asked people to sit alone in a plain white walled laboratory for fifteen minutes without cell phones, books, or any other entertainment. Most of the subjects tapped out before the whole time was up. When the researchers upped the ante by introducing a device which allowed them to jolt themselves with a mildly painful electric shock, they found that an astonishingly high number, two thirds of the men and a quarter of the women, chose to shock themselves, often repeatedly, rather than be left to their own undistracted thoughts.

Some of our wisest philosophers have written tomes trying to grapple with the fact that a person who feels purposeless will often choose self-destructive pursuits or even death to a life where nothing matters. So maybe death is not the most terrifying thing that humans face. Maybe it’s meaningless life.

But for the baptized, life without meaning is no longer an option. If the dead were not raised, then it would be true, as Paul muses, that the sensible way to live would be to simply “eat and drink for tomorrow we die” (1 Cor. 15:32). Everything would be vanity under the sun as the author of Ecclesiastes wrote before him.

But if Jesus has been raised, and if this does in fact point to a future where all of our existential lack is filled in up close appreciation for the brilliance of God and neighbor, and all roads on our cosmic journey lead to this point, then as a favorite professor used to say, “there is more to do with our lives now than just preserve them.”

Because of this confession, “He is risen,” great movements of self-sacrificial poverty have begun and martyrs have died willingly knowing that there are bigger fish to fry now than simply surviving to see another sun rise and fall. We haven’t seen God face to face and can’t say for sure why that experience should be so fulfilling for us that salvation isn’t just the same old meaningless stretched out across eternity. But we have met someone whom we trust, and he has said it is so.

For those of us who aren’t quite ready for martyrdom, the small ways in which we learn to make each day a living witness to the resurrection are not insignificant. Eating dinner around the table rather than the TV in order to hear about the discipleship triumphs and tribulations of our families, taking some time to write a letter to a friend whom we feel might be lonely, driving around the old jalopy car for another couple years in order to have more to give the poor; these are the ways in which our baptismal calling becomes real for us again on a daily basis.

At a more advanced stage of baptismal training, it’s not unheard of for people—yes, even people in these staid Lutheran congregations that we inhabit—to make enormous career changes and household income sacrifices because of something that they felt was more faithful to God’s future. None of those that I know about felt compelled to do so by some religious legal requirement that dictates how we ought to live here and now. They were all moved by the sheer joy of having seen something better ahead on down the road. I’ve never met one, who has made such a step in faith, who is now trying to get back to their often far more lucrative values of yesteryear.

Many of us may not reach this level of radical faithfulness in this lifetime. Here’s the thing though. You have been brought into this movement toward God’s future, whether you like it or not. Most of us were baptized as infants before we could even will it to happen, and no, there is no towel that can dry it off. And from the moment of our baptism forward, we are no longer just existing. Your whole life has a forward momentum that is moving toward God’s feast for all peoples. If you don’t feel like going out and witnessing to the resurrection future of all creation, tough. There is frequent hinting around in the Bible that God can even twist your unfaithful and sometimes downright evil actions into building blocks of this good future.

pt. 2 - things you thought i believed as a christian, but i don't

Being a Christian means that you have to be politically conservative

Where does this perception come from?

I don’t have room here to say much about why the later New Testament letters began to focus more one institutional maintenance and private morality and less on the explosive message that “Jesus is Lord” (as opposed to Caesar), nor on how the Roman Catholic priesthood came to be the overseers of private morality in the medieval world, nor on how early American Protestantism developed as a reaction to social decay in Europe in the 17^th and 18^th centuries century. That would require more than a blog and probably a different author.

The observation I can make here is that sometime in the last quarter of last century, the GOP closed the loop on a brilliant ideological move that it had been working toward for some time. They verbally linked the capitalistic policies that the wealthy care about (lower taxes) to the conservative social values that many poorer communities in southern and Bible Belt states care about. Of course these two things have nothing to do with each other and many sociologists will point out that they outright work against each other. But the fact that that observation is so rarely made by their opponents in popular discourse shows how effectively far right fiscal policies and conservative social values have been made synonmous in our popular consciousness.

Tough to believe now, but as recently as 1972 the platform of the Republican Party contained no references to God and argued for no specifically religious issues. But the next year would be defining for politics right up until today. Capitalizing on the outcry from the Roe v. Wade decision in 1973 (Roe v. Wade), the 1976 platform famously called for “a position on abortion that values human life.” By the turn of the next decade, “family” and “human life” had become unlikely partisan buzzwords in Reagan’s lexicon and the language was reciprocated by a whole new spate of purportedly Christian movements—Jerry Fallwell’s “Moral Majority” in 1980, James Dobson’s “Family Research Council” in 1983, and televangelist Pat Robertson’s rise in popularity resulting in a presidential bid in 1988—who throw their unquestioning support behind Reagan’s party.

So popularly, in just a couple rhetorical moves, family is seen as almost the sole moral concern of Christians and the GOP the official party of family.

Is there a more authentically Christian perspective?

I should say here that, while I do believe my faith has strong political implications, I do not, with some of my liberal contemporaries, flatly say that “Jesus was a socialist.” Whether we lean right or left, it is an absurd case of apples and oranges to try to extract a comprehensive economic structure from a the hand full of parables and aphorisms of a man speaking to a two thousand year old, non-democratic society where official political agency wasn’t even an option for his listeners. That said, if you’ve noticed how rarely “Bible believing Christians” mention what’s actually in the Bible and you yourself have skimmed the parable of the Rich Young Man or the account of the early church in Acts, you’ve probably noticed how much easier it would be to build that case than to build any case for either the nuclear family or unchecked capitalism.

But again, I make no argument for extreme left-wing policy here. What we can say without hesitancy is that the Jesus of the Bible shows aggressive favoritism on the side of the poor and marginalized. He is obsessively concerned with those who are on the outside even when it puts him at odds with the people who are inside. We can also say that he is livid at individuals and institutions—public, private, or religious—that profit on the backs of the poor.

The sum of this observation is that, whatever we decide to do in our private lives or in the institutions we support—public, private, or religious—followers of Jesus had better also be aggressively on the side of the poor and the marginalized. How we can best serve them in a non-patronizing and genuinely beneficial way is on the table for debate. That we must serve them is not.

Ethical concerns are black and white for a Christian

Where does this perception come from?

I suspect that this partly comes from the rubber stamp alignment of American Evangelicalism and the Republican party discussed above. But a much more objective thing to comment on is the biblical literalism that began to invade American Christianity in the 19^th century. If you think of the more “literal” way as the more traditional way of reading the Bible, that’s likely because you’ve believed the rhetoric of the Fallwells and Robertsons mentioned above who have needed to coopt biblical authority to provide some basis for their unquestioning support of the GOP. There is nothing traditional about it. In fact, it is a completely novel innovation that we can date to fairly recent times.

Until about a century ago, respect for the overall authority of scripture was high but respect for inappropriately simplistic interpretations of scripture was low. In the middle ages, reading multiple layers of figurative meaning into a line from the Bible was not only permissible in the Christian tradition, those were considered more weighty than the literal meaning with the “allegorical” reading taking the most prestigious spot in a sophisticated ranking system. Reformers in the 16^th century called for a more “literal” reading, but they only meant to put a check on some of the wildly imaginative nonsense that came out of the medieval church; they did not mean, in the modern sense, that obviously mythological or poetic language in the Bible should be applied in some stupidly matter-of-fact way.   

As we’ve seen already, religious views in America tend to take their queues from political concerns; not the other way around. It was not just Christians’ but everyone’s paradigms that Darwin’s theories initially challenged after the publication of The Origin of Species in 1859 (some obscure anatomists had proposed similar things and the scientific community was not enraged by his theories, but his were the first that were readable at the popular level).

It would be another decade and a half before theologians, politicians and popular commentators began to see its full implication for human origins. It is sheer coincidence that around the turn of the century, debates over whether to teach Darwin’s theories in schools coincided with concern in American churches that modern historical criticism of the Bible (e.g. analysis of original manuscripts, historical context, dating inconsistencies, etc.) was eroding the authority of the good book.

Two huge tectonic shifts in our perception of ourselves and our Bible at one time proved too frightening for a certain personality type. A reactionary group called the “Niagara Bible Conference” formed in 1878 and drafted the principles that would eventually morph into “The Five Fundamentals” of the 1910 General Assembly of the Presbyterian Church from which we get the word: fundamentalism. All of these five had to do with some kind of supernatural belief that they felt was under attack in modernity. One of these five fundamentals was a dogma that Christianity had never before bound itself to in the 19 centuries of its existence: the inerrancy of scripture (assumed but not written alongside this, was belief in the easy and straightforward interpretability of scripture).

The older Christian tradition of serious and intelligent ethical reflection that had only just escaped a longstanding obeisance to the “infallible” Pope four centuries earlier was being relinquished once again, and American protestants were once again kowtowing to an even more inflexible “paper Pope.” 

Is there a more authentically Christian perspective?

If you’ve ever been to a Lutheran worship service, then from the very first words out of your mouth after the opening song, you have foresworn any chance that your political leanings, ethical insights, lifestyle preferences, biblical interpretations or anything about you might be one hundred percent right and without fault. We call this part confession and absolution.

It might sound pessimistic at first, but in fact, when the wrongness of the state of our world and our place in it are realities that continue to intrude on our subconscious even when we choose not to acknowledge them, then telling the truth about these things actually comes out as a hopeful sigh of relief. It’s our way of forcing the issue and saying from the outset that our doctrines, stances, and ideologies get us nowhere if there is no God behind them actually doing stuff. And if God actually does stuff, then anything we think or say about what God is doing is of secondary importance at the most. We then spend the rest of the service proclaiming that God has, in fact, begun doing something to set the world right.

Having confessed that whatever seeds of rightness we’ve ever planted will ultimately wither in the holy sunbeam of God’s presence,

-       we can get on to a more serious and complex ethical conversation about the relative rightness of a certain choice given the alternatives;

-       we can admit to the huge grey areas of a world that often doesn’t give us a choice between right and wrong but between wrong and less wrong;

-       we can argue an issue with someone else without attacking their basic humanity, as if they had taken the dark side in some dualistic battle;

-       and when the time for deliberation is over, we can actually act toward whatever limited good we’re able without getting hamstrung thinking that we need to find some panacea option that will fix everything;

-       and we can actually do what we do for the sake of someone else, since the issue of justifying ourselves with our actions is not on the table.

Luther called this sinning boldly.

things you thought i believed as a Christian, but i don't

When you die your soul goes to either heaven or hell

Why do we think of this belief as Christian?

This a strange one to try to tackle. As a pastor, I know that if I do the funeral of a grieving family that hasn’t seen the inside of a church building in twenty years, that has probably never openly discussed theology, and that may have even renounced any particular faith whatsoever, I know the chances are that I’m still going to hear some quasi-theological sentiments. Namely, I’ll hear that the loved one’s soul continues on outside their deceased body and that if they were basically seen as a good person (according to the family’s baseline moral tolerances and preferences) the loved one’s soul is now in an alternate, parallel plane that we’ll imprecisely refer to as heaven and, if not, another one that we’ll refer to as hell.

What you have to understand, firstly, is that there is nothing specifically Christian about this belief (actually, just the opposite, as I’ll argue in a second). It’s more like the unofficial, metaphysical assumption of Western culture that acts as filler when we lack anything more specific speak of.

Modern heaven and hell depictions spawned not from biblical sources but from Greek speculation on the afterlife (notice the superficial similarities between Heaven and Elysium and between Hell and Hades). The earliest quasi-Christian literature that began to speculate about such things was second century story called The Acts of Paul, a highly fanciful collection that emerged a full century after Paul’s death.  There were periodic mentions of heaven and hell in writings of the first few centuries of Christianity, but earnest speculation about heaven and hell as the fate of good and evil people in the afterlife didn’t start in earnest until Roman Catholicism came into ascendency in the middle ages.

Is there a more authentically Christian belief?

Because Euro-American culture has officially been called “Christian” for the last 17 centuries or so (Wikipedia - Constantine), when the library of our minds doesn’t know where else to file this kind of vaguely supernatural chatter, we absentmindedly file it away in the religious section on the “Christian” shelf.

Here’s the irony, though: the biblically and theologically informed Christian is actually the only person in the Western world who has a story to tell about our eternal fate that is precisely the opposite. We believe in the resurrection of the body and the life of the world to come. We actually believe in the resurrection of dead bodies, not resuscitated but made new. And we believe that this rock on which we live is made new too. I don’t expect this to make Christian beliefs sound any more plausible to anyone. We don’t believe something that’s plausible; we believe something that’s miraculous.

No one really speculates too much on how resurrection works since it’s based on a promise from a person whom we find trustworthy and have encountered in someway after his own death rather than on plausible metaphysics. And because it’s not essential for us to conceive of how it all works, many liberal Christians hedge on the bodily-ness of resurrection because they find it easier to believe in something a little less concrete.  But the key point is that if we live anywhere, it’s still here in this creation. Our souls don’t abandon ship in favor of some more promising metaphysical plane.

Biblically, heaven is, almost by definition, a place where humans can’t dwell. God dwells in heaven, and since God’s holiness is an all-consuming fire that would overwhelm anything in its presence that is not God, heaven is that place where God restricts God’s self so that another place called creation can exist. The two don’t mix—well, not really, but for one exception, the one man, Jesus, is seen as a sort of rift or wormhole in the metaphysical boundary. In biblical speak, he is like a new Jacob’s ladder, up and down which the stuff of heaven can sort of break quarantine and slip through the cracks (but, notably, not the other way around, see John 1:51).

It’s lost in English translations, but when Paul speaks of the dead being raised to go meet the Lord “in the clouds” (1 Thess. 4:13-18), he is not suggesting that they’ll ascend anywhere else permanently, but rather, on Jesus’ descent toward us from heaven we will go meet him as delegates in Roman culture would go outside the city walls to meet a visiting ruler before all parties return together inside the walls of the original city.

In the last chapters of Revelation, humans don’t abandon Earth and get plucked up into heaven, but a new Jerusalem (an intermediary space where God’s holiness can exists in the midst of creation) descends from a new heaven down to a new Earth.

Why is this distinction important?

If we believe in an eternal future that has nothing to do with the creation we now occupy, what impetus could we have to care for this creation? That so many American Christians can concern themselves with private morality as it unfolds inside the home while espousing public views and policies that are outright hostile to this world that John tells us “God so loved” and that God called “very good” from the very earliest chapter in the Bible, is nothing but crass ignorance of their own tradition.

A Christian who is convinced that creation is precious and that God’s intentions for the future of humanity have to do with this creation and no other ought to be the first to, in Martin Luther’s words, “plant a tree.”

God chooses either to save or to not save individuals based on their merits

Why do we think of this as a Christian belief today?

For Jesus and for most of the New Testament, salvation is something that happens to communities, not to individuals. Some hint that individuals might receive salvation for themselves starts to creep into 1 and 2 Timothy and Titus which are the latest of the NT epistles written somewhere between 90 and 115 AD. Early patristic fathers like Origen speculate here and there about the fate of individuals, but salvation is still assumed to mostly be a communal concern until Augustine begins to speculate on the matter and elevates it to the level of church doctrine in the late 4^th-early 5th centuries.

Is there a more authentically Christian belief?

Biblically, since salvation is, by definition, reconciliation and restoration back into a joyful community with God, with each other, and with nonhuman creation, it’s inconceivable for salvation to happen to individuals apart from community. When Jesus does seem to indicate that he has “saved” an individual (e.g.  the Gerasene demoniac in Mark 5; Zaccheus in Luke 19:1-10; or the man born blind in John 4) salvation means precisely that they had been in a state of isolation from community but have been brought back.

For the Hebraic thinkers that first started confessing, “He is risen,” Jesus’ life, death, and resurrection wasn’t understood to have reconciled certain individuals to God. It was seen as the event that fulfilled God’s covenant with a family that was blessed in the days of Abraham with the intention that they might become a blessing to all families. And even when the early church did debate over the scope of Jesus’ salvation, the debate was not about whether Jesus’ actions might have relevance for Lionel but not for Jim Bob. They debated whether they had relevance for the community of the uncircumcised or for the community of Apollos.

Any depiction of eternal self-fulfillment in the absence of community sanctifies the very narcissism that Jesus despised. If Jesus has anything to say about it, salvation must definitely involve reconciliation with our enemies and with people whose lifestyle, beliefs, and so on we now disapprove of. Creating a reconciled community of people who already got along with each other and believed the same things would be no miracle at all. It’s called reconciliation precisely because people whom we didn’t consider part of our community become our community.

Why is this important?

This ‘Murica.