23 August 2010 
Strangers in a Strange Land
In addition to a “royal priesthood” and a “holy nation,” the King James Bible speaks of Christians in 1 Peter 2:9 as a “peculiar people.” Modern translations dispense with the term, but it seems that to at least one sociologist, some Bible-belt Christians are so far removed from American culture that they’re deserving of studies to document their peculiarity.
Bernadette Barton, a sociology professor at Morehead State University in Kentucky, recently took her class on several field trips to the Creation Museum in northern Kentucky — a trip that apparently struck fear in her students:
On her third trip to the museum, Barton took her undergraduate students, who found the visit unsettling. Several in the group were former fundamentalists who had since rejected that worldview. Several others were gay. In part because of these backgrounds, Barton said, the students were on edge at the museum. Particularly nerve-wracking were signs warning that guests could be asked to leave the premises at any time. The group’s reservation confirmation also noted that museum staff reserved the right to kick the group off the property if they were not honest about the “purpose of [the] visit.”
Because of these messages, Barton said, the students felt they might accidentally reveal themselves as nonbelievers and be asked to leave. This pressure is a form of “compulsory Christianity” that is common in a region known for its fundamentalism, Barton said. People who don’t ascribe to fundamentalism often report the need to hide their thoughts for fear of being judged or snubbed.
At one point, Barton reported in her paper, a guard with a dog circled a student pointedly twice without saying anything. When he left, a museum patron approached the student and said, “The reason he did that is because of the way you’re dressed. We know you’re not religious; you just don’t fit in.” (The student was wearing leggings and a long shirt, Barton writes.)
Having never visited the Creation Museum (do they sell replicas of Adam’s rib at the gift shop?), I can’t relate to the oppressive fear that these students must have felt. One can only imagine the displacement felt by the professor and her students during their expedition. After all, they endured the nearly two and a half-hour journey from the cosmopolitan venues of Morehead, Kentucky to the wilds of the Greater Cincinnati Metro Area — only to be accosted by a canine and almost conscripted into “compulsory Christianity” had their disguises been slightly less effective.
All ribbing aside, while the absurdity of this account reveals how out-of-touch with their own surroundings the Morehead expedition was, it reminds us of the reality that Christian beliefs are increasingly cast by the world as quaint eccentricities — even when the numbers may not validate such a view. At this, we Christians shouldn’t be as shocked as our professor on her field study.
Whether or not the Creation Museum is a proper touchstone of twenty-first century Christianity is certainly debatable , but it is of little importance. For any Christian who believes that a dead man got up out of his grave two thousand years ago, there is an ever-increasing gulf with those who do not — a fact which no amount of cultural hipness can overcome. We will be found weird, wanting, and ripe for ridicule. We will be painted with a broad brush, and the temptation will be to say “that’s not me — I’m not like those Christians.” It would be better — when the occasion arises — if we instead pointed to Christ and lamented how unlike him we are. Better yet if we pointed out how unlike us he is.
24 December 2009
Eat Well This Christmas
When pondering the nativity, I’ve heard much made of the fact that the manger is a place of great humility for the King of Kings to be found, and rightly so. I’ve seldom given much thought, however, to what the manger was — a feeding place for animals.
There’s little evidence that there were animals present at Christ’s birth. “The cattle were lowing,” as the song goes, but it it’s difficult to imagine a Jewish setting with high values on both cleanliness and hospitality that would permit a woman to give birth while having to worry about being stepped on by a donkey. The manger was indeed lowly, but this manger was not in use when Mary and Joseph sought a place to lay their child.
There is no stable mentioned in any of the gospel accounts — just the manger. The shepherds are not told to go to a stable, but a manger. They would not find the baby lying at his mother’s breast — the most logical place to find a newborn — but lying in a manger.
22 May 2009
Leon Kass’s grand tour of humanity
Last night’s 2009 National Endowment for the Humanities Lecture with Leon Kass was, unsurprisingly, superb. Kass, who among other things assembled the first President’s Council on Bioethics, is the epitome of a renaissance man due to his diverse background of study, gave a lecture entitled, “Searching for an Honest Man: Reflections of an Unlicensed Humanist.”
The lecture followed the motif of the Greek philosopher Diogenes, who walked the streets endlessly with a lantern “looking for an honest man.” Kass notes that what Diogenes is really looking for is better translated as a “true human being.” The search for the true human being — and just what it means to be a human being — made up the bulk of the lecture.
Like Harvey Mansfield’s Jefferson lecture two years before, Kass noted that modern science has — to its fault — abdicated the humanities. No longer does medicine look at health, but to emerging technologies. Modern science looks intricately at the parts, but often fails to observe the whole. It can describe what chemical processes take place in the eye for vision to occur, but it cannot explain “seeing.” The humanities are needed for such endeavors — and they are likewise needed when dealing with decisions that involve whole human beings.
Kass has found progress in his own search for the true human in sources such as the Aristotelian view of the soul, the Hebrew Bible, and through books and companions along the way. Kass, more so than many other public intellectuals, is on the right track in viewing humanity as the sum of its parts, a unified psyche and soma.
The only thing that I might add (if I dare!) to Kass’s grand tour of true humanity is to note the Christian view of true humanity’s culmination — namely the True Human Being: Jesus of Nazareth. Fully God, Jesus was the true human being — the only human who was and is fully human.
16 March 2009
History, principle, and the now
D.A. Carson on the value of Christians continually appealing to the notion that America was founded on Christian principles:
In the long haul, Christians have to appeal farther back than to the middle of the eighteenth century — to the Scriptures themselves, and the events to which they attest — and think through to where we are today and will be tomorrow. To learn from history is one thing; to make constant appeal to yesteryear is to support rather too much of the nostalgic and rather too little of the prophetic. [Christ and Culture Revisited, p. 210]
The danger, of course, to appeals like this, is that at some point the opposition says, “So what? We’re changing things now.” When a people refuses to care about history, what our founding fathers may or may not have believed matters little.
Every position should stand on its own merits now. History should inform us — as it’s always difficult to judge the now as it happens — but it should never be the central plank in our efforts to speak for a better society.
11 March 2009
Sanity, sin and evil
The Alabama shooting, like the Virginia Tech massacre before it, is sure to unleash a wave of speculation about what drove the troubled young Michael McLendon to do what he did. Even this morning on my commute, I overheard a discussion of the killing spree in which one fellow conceded, “Since he killed that many people, it just can’t be evil — he must have been insane.”
That insanity can and should be a legal defense I do not dispute. It is, of course, too often misapplied and abused to let murderers off the hook, but the insanity defense should not be discarded. A person lacking control of his sense of reality should not be held to the same legal culpability as someone who possesses his full mental faculties. The problem with my fellow commuter’s view is that while sanity may have much to do with a legal defense, it has little to do with whether or not an act is evil.
Evil is often irrespective of its object. The Hebrews knew this concept well. The predominant Hebrew term for evil in the Old Testament (raa) has a range of meaning from everything to natural disasters and calamity, to human acts of violence. The word is introduced in Genesis 2:9 with respect to the tree from which the man and the woman were not to eat. In Genesis 39:9, Joseph speaks of adultery with Potiphar’s wife as a “great evil.” The narrator of Job even tells us that Yahweh himself had brought evil upon Job [Job 42:11], and 1 Samuel 16:14 speaks of an “evil spirit” sent from Yahweh. God is of course not himself evil, but in these instances he providentially wields evil for his purposes.
It follows that evil does not equal sin, but it does, however, have a strong relationship with sin. Sin is always an evil action, but all evil forces, though always unpleasant, are not necessarily sinful. Evil existed on the tree and with the serpent before Adam and Eve premiered the first sin. Sin lives, thrives, and is born where evil meets humanity.
Whether or not Michael McLendon was legally insane, we may never know. What we do know is that insane or not, his actions were indeed evil, and evil is at work in the world. The Apostle John reminded us long ago that “whole world lies in the power of the evil one“ — a fact that should make us all tremble, since we are all just as prone to be caught up and turned by evil.
Thankfully John also reminds us that if we are born of God, we have a Protector who can keep us from evil. Without Him, nothing stands between us and evil. God help us all.
10 January 2009
Jesus, branding, and the myth of neutral messaging
There is much to commend in Tyler Wigg-Stevenson’s Christianity Today cover story, “Jesus Is Not a Brand,” but this excerpt is especially noteworthy:
The difficulty with the pro-marketing arguments, however, is the failure to recognize that marketing is not a values-neutral language. Marketing unavoidably changes the message—as all media do. Why? Because marketing is the particular vernacular of a consumerist society in which everything has a price tag. To market something is therefore to effectively make it into a branded product to be consumed. The folks at ChurchMarketingSucks.com have no problem with this: “Marketing is the process of promoting, selling, and distributing goods or services. It’s a business concept, but something very similar happens in the church. As much as we bristle at comparing evangelism to a sales pitch, there are certain similarities.”
There are indeed similarities. But evangelism and sales are not the same. And we market the church at our peril if we are blind to the critical and categorical difference between the Truth and a truth you can sell. In a marketing culture, the Truth becomes a product. People will encounter it with the same consumerist worldview with which they encounter every other product in the American marketplace.
Wigg-Stevenson’s premise, of course, is that “marketing” is not a concept that can be imposed upon the church in the same way in which it is imposed upon business. The problem with this (and the reason why many will dismiss the article) is the frighteningly large number of churches whose polity more closely resembles a TQM-management textbook than the biblical model of the church.
Given my own experience in both the church and the marketing/branding field (my undergrad major was advertising, and I’ve worked for a firm that branded people among other things), I think the points raised by Wigg-Stevenson are even more prevalent and dangerous than the level-headed tone of his article betrays. The world’s methods may often be amoral in some sense, but they are by no means neutral. Whenever I shape a message into a form or medium, my message takes on some of the inherent properties of that medium whether I like it or not.
I’ll have more to say about this topic later when I finish reading Lucas Conley’s OBD: Obsessive Branding Disorder: The Illusion of Business and the Business of Illusion, but until then, you would do well to read the whole Wigg-Stevenson CT piece.
3 June 2008
Truth on the slant
In the most recent issue of the Mars Hill Audio Journal, Ken Myers spoke with Eugene Peterson on the place of reading in the spiritual lives of Christians. They reference a brilliant poem by Emily Dickinson from which Peterson takes the title of his upcoming book, Tell it Slant. Here’s the poem:
Tell all the Truth but tell it slant
Tell all the Truth but tell it slant—
Success in Cirrcuit lies
Too bright for our infirm Delight
The Truth’s superb surpriseAs Lightening to the Children eased
With explanation kind
The Truth must dazzle gradually
Or every man be blind—
I’m ashamed to say that I’ve never before come across this gem, but I’m glad I did, as it expertly highlights an oft-overlooked aspect of truth-telling: sometimes the best way to tell the truth is indirectly.
The principle is not foreign to the Bible. Moses, for example, asks to see the full glory of Yahweh, but is told by God, “you cannot see my face, for man shall not see me and live.” (see Exodus 33:17-23) Moses is instead offered a glimpse of God’s backside — an encounter that was still so powerful that he had to veil his face because it glowed so brightly.
Peterson noted that Jesus’ parables were constructed explicitly to bring truth in an indirect manner. Having people get the point immediately didn’t seem to be goal of such cryptic storytelling. Truth apprehended immediately doesn’t always have the same staying power as truth revealed eventually.
Such indirection is not to be mistaken for deception. Deception, with its substitution of false reality, is too intertwined with untruth to be a proper tool for truth telling.
It must also be noted that indirection isn’t the only manner in which truth must be presented. It was necessary for the Apostle Paul to be blinded (by the Truth, no less) on the road to Damascus. Only such an abrupt encounter with truth could prepare him to later write these words: “For now we see in a mirror dimly, but then face to face. Now I know in part; then I shall know fully, even as I have been fully known.”
Indeed, sometimes the truth hurts. But it can also hint, or — better said — dazzle gradually.
28 May 2008
What is ‘good’?
It’s a good question — one posed by Ron H. in his comment on my recent “Darwinism and good” post:
What can adequately explain why something is or isn’t good? Equivalently: What is good?
For many (in practice this is most, I imagine), something is good if it turns out the way a person wishes. Good is reduced to whatever is the most pleasant outcome.
This view is problematic in that there is so much more to “goodness” than its typical subjective uses. There exists an objective good, whether or not we can ascertain it.
As a Christian, I view the concept of good through the lens of biblical revelation. The concept is there throughout Scripture, and shows up early on in the Old Testament book of Genesis:
And God said, “Let there be light,” and there was light. And God saw that the light was good. And God separated the light from the darkness. (Genesis 1:3-4, ESV)
Good is that which is wrought by God.
In the New Testament, good is applied on a personal level:
And as he was setting out on his journey, a man ran up and knelt before him and asked him, “Good Teacher, what must I do to inherit eternal life?” And Jesus said to him, “Why do you call me good? No one is good except God alone. (Mark 10:17-18, ESV)
And to gifts we’ve been given:
Every good gift and every perfect gift is from above, coming down from the Father of lights with whom there is no variation or shadow due to change. (James 1:17, ESV)
These are but a few examples that begin to show a biblical view of good. The Scriptures indicate that good is a reflection of God’s actions and his character. Good emanates from God.
Without such grounding, it becomes difficult to quantify good in terms other than mere personal preference. It would seem, for example, that a naturalist — who believes that the natural world is all that there is — has little grounding for appealing to the good. I can say that a little girl’s smile is good, because I know that she is a good creation of God.
Upon what can a naturalist base a view of good?
29 April 2008
Evangelical espionage
Just how crazy are those wacky evangelicals? Matt Taibbi of Rolling Stone wanted to find out, so he went “Undercover with the Christian Right” by immersing himself in the world of TBN star John Hagee’s Cornerstone Church.
There’s much not to like about the methods that Taibbi employed for the piece, which is an excerpt for a forthcoming book. First of all, to act as if you’re going in to uncharted territory by investigating pentecostal Christians is a little disingenuous. After all, this is America. There’s a pentecostal on every corner — they’re not that hard to find.
Second, why in the world would a reporter use an alias when signing up to attend a retreat at John Hagee’s church? Was he afraid someone would recognize him as a writer for Rolling Stone? The folks he described didn’t strike me as the type to sit waiting each month with bated breath for their copy of RS to arrive just so they can read Matt Taibbi. Understandable if he were investigating the mafia, but pentecostals?
Third, Taibbi suffers from a condition common to many media professionals: ignorance of the evangelical landscape. The reason for this undercover stint, he claims, was to “to get a look inside the evangelical mind-set that gave the country eight years of George W. Bush.” To claim Hagee as the cornerstone for the evangelical mind-set in America is pretty big leap. Hagee is at best a subset.
That said, Taibbi does come away with a few observations of which evangelicals should take note. This passage in particular highlights the kind of psycho-babble that often shows up even in churches outside the pentecostal sphere:
The program revolved around a theory that [retreat leader Philip Fortenberry] quickly introduced us to called “the wound.” The wound theory was a piece of schlock biblical Freudianism in which everyone had one traumatic event from their childhood that had left a wound. The wound necessarily had been inflicted by another person, and bitterness toward that person had corrupted our spirits and alienated us from God. Here at the retreat we would identify this wound and learn to confront and forgive our transgressors, a process that would leave us cleansed of bitterness and hatred and free to receive the full benefits of Christ.
[...]
We were about a third of the way through the process when I began to wonder what the hell was going on. Fortenberry’s blowhard-on-crack-act/wound gobbledygook were all suspiciously secular in tone and approach. I had been hearing whispers throughout the first day or so to the effect that there was some kind of incredible supernatural religious ceremony that was going to take place at the end of the retreat (“Tighten your saddle, he’s fixin’ ta buck” was how “cowboy” Fortenberry put it), when we would experience “Victory and Deliverance.” But as far as I could see, in the early going, most of what we were doing was simple pop-psych self-examination using New Age-y diagnostic tools of the Deepak Chopra school: Identify your problems, face your oppressors, visualize your obstacles. Be your dream job. With a little rhetorical tweaking and much better food, this could easily have been Tony Robbins instructing a bunch of Upper East Side housewives to “find your wounds” (“My husband hid my Saks card!”) at a chic resort in Miami Beach or the Hamptons.
When a writer for Rolling Stone can recognize that your preaching is more pop-psychology than biblical truth, you’re in trouble. Sadly, much of the evangelical landscape shares this wholesale adoption of talk-show therapy. It’s a practice the Apostle Paul might well refer to as conformity to the world.
The gist of Taibbi’s piece is to show how markedly different these alien Christians are from the norm. Though he saw some pretty nutty stuff (glossolalia in the form of Russian band DDT!), it’s ironic just how much wasn’t as different from the world as it should have been.
28 April 2008
The Bible on Googling oneself
Well, more or less:
“It is not good to eat much honey, Nor is it glory to search out one’s own glory.”
Proverbs 25:27, NASB