Disease Divine

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Diseases, for most people of the modern West, are difficult to diagnose as divine. At my wife’s urging, I’ve been reading Anne Fadiman’s The Spirit Catches You and You Fall Down: A Hmong Child, Her American Doctors, and the Collision of Two Cultures. I have a feeling I’ll be commenting on various aspects as I read through it, but something caught me almost immediately. Although the book is not about religion, the culture of the Hmong (about which I knew nothing just hours ago) is truly imbued with religion. Our medical science is, well, science (unless perhaps you’re from Athens, Georgia). Western culture since the Enlightenment has come to understand many of the body’s systems intimately, discerning just which chemicals to proscribe to treat this or that electro-chemical reaction in the body. And we consider it normal. Epilepsy, the condition of Lia Lee, is a disease that, as Fadiman points out, has had a long divine pedigree even in the west. The Judaic tradition at various stages considered it demonic possession, the Romans understood it as a kind of deity-induced madness.

Interestingly, Fadiman uses the case of Tony Coelho, an epileptic and congressmen, to make a point about the Hmong community. Coelho, she notes, had been intending to enter the priesthood but the Church has a canon forbidding ordination to an epileptic. This gave me a considerable pause. Clergy in many cultures must be “perfect” physical specimens. According to the Hebrew Bible, men who had certain deformities “down there” were disqualified, although, one notes, that they would have served fully clothed. Epilepsy, having been putative cured by Jesus many times, might seem a strange disqualifier from priesthood. I wondered why it was singled out from among the many maladies that might have seemed more pressing. Even in our enlightened age, epilepsy still bears the scars of the divine.

Narrating the experience of the Hmong in a Thai refugee camp, Fadiman notes that the subtext was often conversion. As she points out, for the Hmong medicine is religion. Although the missionaries had converted some, their very enthusiasm ensured that the Hmong would not generally go to them for treatment. Here is a stark difference between a people whose religion permeates every aspect of their lives and westerners for whom religion is compartmentalized in a different place than medical science. For the Hmong, wellness is part of a larger picture from which religious belief simply can’t be separated. For some epilepsy is a disease to be cured, if possible. For others it is a sign of a budding shaman. I look forward to reading more, as it is clear that by shifting perspectives, even the enlightened might have something to learn from those they deem uneducated.

Parsing God

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Being married to a Girl Scout leads to many benefits beyond just the cookies. Not that cookies are unimportant, of course. Having been a Boy Scout briefly back in the 1970’s, I recall three-finger salutes, rambunctious meetings, and the occasional camping trip complete with the rabbit coming out of the hole, going around the tree and then something else. I’m sure there was a Boy Scout pledge, but I can’t remember it. Like most group activities, Boy Scout meetings served mainly to remind me of my own inferiority, and so my mind does not often enjoy visiting those places. Having attended a few Girl Scout meetings over the years as my daughter was growing up, I heard the Girl Scout promise a few times, and was a little surprised that the phrase, “To serve my God” has remained unaltered, even with the changing face of the population. When I attended an event hosted by the Elks, the civic organization, the presenter began by explaining the rules for who might join. It too, is limited to theists. The reason for such admission requirements has me pondering if there was a time God was an endangered entity in the United States. If not, why insist on this proviso?

I’ve been reading about religion’s role in society. Something that those who seek primarily the deep, personal and experiential aspect of religion may not realize is that religion is a form of social order. Scientific knowledge about God, if God be incorporeal, non-material, and beyond space and time, is impossible. Religions don’t prove God’s existence, but they serve to reinforce the sanction of the sacred for human society. They have an essential role in that drama. By limiting membership to believers organizations such as the Elks are merely asserting their belief in the working of the system. Of course, from the beginning those who do not believe risk little by claiming they do believe.

But what of the doubter, who may be the truest believer of all? Some Girl Scout literature has a footnote, parsing God: “The word ‘God’ can be interpreted in a number of ways, depending on one’s spiritual beliefs.” Belief is a form of commitment more than a mental certainty. In the Hebrew Bible belief was not as strong a suit as obedience; and thus it had been for the history of organized religion. Starting perhaps as early as Jeremiah, a shift began to take religion more toward a matter of internal commitment. In the face of utter loss, Jeremiah (or one of his fans) suggested that belief was more important that unthinking obedience. Belief is very subtle but vitally powerful. Lives are staked, and sometimes lost, on it. So while you’re enjoying another cookie, try parsing your belief. Me? I’m still trying to figure out when that rabbit goes back in the hole.

Ban This

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It should be a scarlet letter week. In honor of Banned Book Week, I’ve started to re-read Kurt Vonnegut’s Slaughterhouse-Five. Somehow I made it through high school and college without having been exposed to Vonnegut. A friend started me reading his works when I was about ready to start my Master’s degree, and I’ve always enjoyed coming back to him. When my daughter asked me why Slaughterhouse-Five had been placed on The List, I honestly couldn’t guess. Banning books, of course, is a scheme chiefly intended to keep children unexposed to ideas that adults find uncomfortable. We can’t go around telling other adults what not to think (although that hasn’t stopped many a religious tradition from trying), so some individuals figure that we can protect our unthinking young by putting in the corner literature that asks awkward questions. More radical conservative elements suggest destroying them. These are the true grapes of wrath.

Ideas can be wonderfully dangerous things. We now face a brave new world of internet access where ideas float lightly on the web and unless we watch our children constantly, we can’t control what they might see. Ideas as traditionally expressed in literature go through a tremendously long and convoluted birth process. We even use the language of conception to describe how they begin in one’s mind. Ideas implant, gestate, and grow. For the writer this might represent weeks, months, or years of writing, erasing, re-writing, and yes, parenting the idea. The written book has to meet the approval of publishers and only after yet another editing process are they pronounced fit to see the light of day as books. Having passed through many hands, many heads, such ideas become part of their culture. If we find them objectionable, well, isn’t that just part of life? Perhaps that is the largest message to be gleaned from the world of books: no one will be pleased with them all. Even the diary of a young girl will raise alarm.

Some of the finest literature to escape human minds has been challenged or banned. Ironically, in the land of the free and the home of the brave fear of books runs at a fever pitch seldom encountered elsewhere. Afraid of mice and men. What has made this country such a wonderful experiment—the embracing of diversity—has somehow morphed into a neighborhood where nobody feels safe if there are objectionable words on the bookshelf. Ironically Ray Bradbury’s critique of banning books, Fahrenheit 451, is itself a banned book. What most proponents of stopping literature probably don’t realize is that according to OCLC, the source for library data, the most banned book of all time is the Bible. To be honest, those who’ve read it know that it has sex and violence and many other adult situations. In the original languages there are even “swears.” Maybe it’s time people just grew up. The best way to accomplish that is to read a book. Hey, it’s a jungle out there.

Who’s Got the Keys?

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Having grown up Protestant, I assumed that was normal. Adults, who have the benefit of years of negotiating with other adults in ways that may seem unsavory to children, have the definite advantage here. Children believe what their parents tell them, and should the matter come down to eternal life or everlasting damnation, you sure want them to have your back. Sunday’s New Jersey Star-Ledger has a perspective piece by Tom Moran, whose parents raised him Catholic. Catholics and Protestants are Christians divided by a common religion. As I have studied the teachings of each over the years, it has sometimes felt impossible to fit the two together in any meaningful way. They both think Jesus is cool, but beyond that, the disagreements almost immediately begin. Moran notes that in the US fewer than one in four adults identifies as Catholic although one in three was raised in that tradition. His article goes on to outline how Catholicism has frequently aligned itself with law at the sacrifice of compassion. Sounds like religion to me.

Religionists place great, perhaps even eternal, stock in being right. The Catholic Church has traditionally considered itself expert in issues of reproduction, a conceit that is only more bold when it is regulated by celibate men. And the source can’t really be the Bible since there are plenty of places where the good book is a little naughty. The biblical understanding of reproduction was a conclusively unscientific postulate. When microscopes, not telescopes, revealed what was going on at the microscopic level, theology should’ve blushed and excused itself from the room. Instead, the church proclaimed that it knew better than any bespectacled intellectual; after all, unwavering tradition must count for something. This bears the imprint of a system with little left but theological bluster. And it’s losing its thinking members.

Moran interviewed Newark Archbishop John Myers, a man concerned with the sanctity of marriage and who has a questionable record of reporting abuses, for his story. As Moran pointed out, Myers has not been the outspoken advocate of the poor, but he does back the candidate with sacred underwear. I’m not sure when the last time was that the good Archbishop took a drive around Newark. It is hardly a little piece of heaven on earth. Even waiting for a train in the station can fill a customer with a sense of despair. God’s will, apparently, is somewhat more narrowly focused on what consenting adults do behind closed doors. The level of disjunction is enough to throw the Popemobile out of alignment. Of course, I write all this from the sidelines. I was raised Protestant, and no matter what the Mormons or the Catholics say, I was taught from my youngest years that they’re just plain wrong.

Those are some big keys…

Bretz v. Noah

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Until I met my wife I’d never been west of the Mississippi. Or even Ohio for that matter. Together we’ve traveled, in a fashion broken by years, from coast-to-coast and even overseas. Nothing in my life had prepared me for seeing the American West. No, I’ve not seen cowboys, but the landforms are so different from the weathered, ancient Appalachians among which I grew up. Eastern Washington is a fascinating landscape and with my occasional flirting with geology, I recently read John Soennichsen’s Bretz’s Flood: The Remarkable Story of a Rebel Geologist and the World’s Greatest Flood. Within the last couple of years I’d read about Glacial Lake Missoula, a juggernaut of an ice age lake that had flooded parts of Idaho and Washington thousands of years ago when its ice dam gave way. J Harlen Bretz was a turn-of-the-(previous)-century geologist who defied convention and insisted that the evidence of eastern Washington proved that a massive flood washed over the area, giving distinct shape to the region that empties into the Columbia River basin. For much of his career he was ridiculed by other geologists. The reason? The Bible.

Geology was the science that gave Darwin the idea for his evolutionary theory. The factor that had been missing from science, before geology, was time. The 6000-year-old earth just wasn’t old enough to account for the slow changes required for one species to morph into another. As scientists came to realize that billions of years were available, it became clear that change occurred even more slowly than the GOP is happy with. For geologists, anything that happened quickly was anathema. As Bretz’s Flood makes clear, a sudden flood sounded far too much like old Noah to be science. Catastrophism had been cleanly rejected by geologists because even if the evidence supported it, it looked like a return to mythology and superstition. Interestingly Bretz began his academic life among the Methodists of Albion College, and continued to quote the Bible to his last days. He was, however, an atheist.

The Bible has shaped our culture more thoroughly than Noah’s putative flood has shaped geology. I’ve read many geological studies over the years and any that are written for non-specialists never mention great floods without at least a nod to Noah. In fact, as Soennichsen points out, Bretz has ironically become a hero of Creationists who see the Missoula flood as Noah’s event. A large portion of Bretz’s career, however, was dogged by geologists duty-bound to deny a sudden flood just because the Bible tells us so. Sudden events are smeared with the residue of the divine.

J Harlen Bretz is hardly a household name, but his career is a microcosm of American culture. Glacial Lake Missoula did exist, as geologists now accept, and long before Noah was a twinkle in Moses’ eye. When the dam burst, the fable did fall, and down came the ark, Noah and all.

Watch, and Pray

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Religion is a lucrative business. There is likely a deep, evolutionary urge for fair play nestled somewhere in primate DNA. Monkeys and apes seem concerned about it, and certainly nothing gets people more upset than a cheater who does prosper (unless he, less often she, is the protagonist of some gangster movie). Most of us work pretty hard to make a living, often doing tasks that push us beyond our comfort range in order to ensure some kind of success. The same is true of clergy. Yes, stories of lazy or lackadaisical ministers abound, but many work long hours under often stressful conditions. Most are not paid very well. Their eyes, according to unwritten writ, are turned toward a larger prize. In an economy that has become a nearly universal capitalism, everything has a price. People want to feel that they are pleasing God but there are oh so many rules and regulations! The Hebrew Bible alone has 613, and then add the Christian Scriptures and two millennia of ecclesiological dogmatism and you’ve got one hefty bill. We don’t mind paying a bit of that for a religious specialist to take care of the details while we get on with the real business of life.

Now add a little math. How many people does it take to add up to a small fortune? Already by the Middle Ages the Catholic Church, really the only show in town across Europe, had amassed a real treasury. Although individually the clergy could claim to own nothing, collectively they were flush. Even today the wealth (and therefore power) of the Vatican is nearly beyond comprehension. A colleague recently pointed me to a story I had missed back in April. This involved the computer age and lucre in an unexpected place. Russian Orthodox Patriarch Kirill I was photographed sitting at a high-gloss table, wearing a Breguet watch valued at $30,000. There was an outcry. The Russian Church, long under the pressure of a communist state, could hardly be described as opulent. Well, liturgical vestments and accouterments are expected to be costly, but personal items such as watches, are expected to be modest. Thirty-thousand dollars is a lot of money to be reminded of when to show up for mass.

In response, some church leaders turned to technology for a solution. The watch was Photoshopped out of the picture and, as if a miracle, the scandal disappeared! Except they forgot the glossy tabletop—the reflection of the watch, like Dorian Gray’s portrait, remained as evidence. (The story may be found here, along with the damning photos, if you can stand the snarky writing.) Owning such a watch may be considered bad form among the humble clergy, hiding it, however, is even worse. I don’t mean to single out Patriarch Kirill—the Russians have had a pretty rough go of it, what with Stalin and Reagan and all—but religions seldom like to have their coffers examined. The laity will pay handsomely to avoid the extra work salvation demands. Herein lies the rub: salvation has become less tangible as material wealth has expanded. Many people have mistaken one for the other. It’s just that they don’t want to get caught enjoying a little too much of the one at the expense of the other.

Now watch this, for time is fleeting

The King’s Bible

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Thumbing through last week’s Time, I found a Bible. Actually, stories of religious interest appear frequently in Time, but this was one of those small blurbs of human interest. It appears that Elvis Presley’s Bible just sold for $94,600 in the UK. Of course, Elvis was known for his gospel recordings as well as his formative role in rock-n-roll. A boy from the south in those days would have known his Bible. What struck me as worthy of comment is the reason the artifact was priced so high—not because it is a religious book, or the putatively divine content, but because of who once owned it. The Bible is a common enough item—billions have been printed—and in our world of value based on rarity, it is hardly a specialty item. In fact, they are often given away.

We have all felt the draw of fame now and again. We wonder what the lives of the rich and famous are like. Sotheby’s and Christie’s thrive on people wanting to possess articles from their deceased heroes. Studies have been conducted to demonstrate just how much laundering devalues clothes worn by both the famous (bad) and infamous (good). In the case of a Bible, perhaps one is put in touch with the spiritual residue of the owner. According to Time, Presley scribbled many notes in his Bible. Perhaps there is some eternal message there? A message untainted by years of study. A message from Graceland.

The King (of kings?)

Elvis Presley was not acclaimed for his great intellect. He had a singing voice and swinging hips that changed an entire culture, but his was not the world of the library and study. Naturally it is the more flamboyant that capture the imagination of the largest numbers. I can imagine the (a) Bible of Rudolf Bultmann, Charles Briggs, or William F. Albright on the auction block. There would be a flurry among some scholars, for sure, perhaps to pool their money enough to make a bid some order of magnitude less than Presley’s sequined presence of the auction table demands. Probably it would not even be worth the effort of the auctioneer. After all, no matter what doggerel he might have scribbled in the margins, the King always outranks the mere pawns.

Longer Nights

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Nothing accompanies the slow decent into winter like scary movies. Now that autumn is officially here, it is time to look for the religious motifs in frightening movies again. Perhaps it is time to join Netflicks, because when it comes to my own movies I have mainly choices among bargain basement films I’ve picked up over the years. Over the weekend I watched one of them. John Carpenter’s Prince of Darkness is the second of his apocalyptic-themed movies, following on the remarkably creepy The Thing. (This is one of the few remakes that manages to outdo the original in just about every way.) Prince of Darkness, however falters almost from the beginning. I do appreciate a movie that is straightforward about using religion as the source of fear, and one that even has a character who is a graduate student in theology! Apart from the priest and street people, all the ill-fated characters are academics—professors and grad students of theoretical physics, the sciences, and our one, lone theologian. The plot revolves, literally, around a swirling green liquid in a decrepit church, which is the Anti-Christ.

Although the trappings are all here for a truly frightening experience, Christianity doesn’t really lend itself to a frightening mythology. To get to something truly tremendous, Prince of Darkness posits a kind of gnostic anti-God who is the father of Satan. The persona is evil writ so large that it is simply not believable that a corroded screw-top jar is able to contain him. For anyone who’s studied history or anthropology, placing the date of the Ball Mason jar back seven million years ago sounds like random guesswork. Homo sapiens sapiens weren’t even around then, making one wonder why God thought of a jar to trap the viscous Anti-Christ millions of years before the “fall” necessitated a regular Christ. The Bible appears, in transmogrified form, as an ancient book of spells that when translated sound suspiciously like the good old King James.

The movie does have its creepy moments—abandoned churches are scary; even fully functional ones can be remarkably spooky at night. It is difficult to accept that a priest would go to a physics professor before consulting his bishop, but then we have to prevent this movie from becoming just a watered-down Exorcist flick. Having Alice Cooper appear as the leader of the homeless minions was a nice touch, in any case. Since we are all still here, the movie ends predictably enough, with Satan’s Dad being stopped before entering the world. It does, in a de rigueur metanarrative, involve a self-sacrifice, albeit not a virginal one. And for the surviving handful of academics, life goes on as normal the morning after. Perhaps evil was blown too large to be believable here. Enough human-sized diabolism exists to frighten any reasonable person. And autumn is only just starting.

Pipe Dreams

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While I was off in Indiana, Jesus was coming down in New Jersey. Well, at least a graven image was. My wife saved the front page of Thursday’s New Jersey Star-Ledger that had a front-page, above the fold headline, “Workers give Jesus a much-needed lift.” The caption notes that in a gusty storm on Tuesday the 200-300 pound Jesus (this is America, after all) tumbled off his pedestal at Saint John’s School in Orange. A crane hoisting the fallen Lord dominates the first page. Clearly a bit of irony on a slow news day, the social commentary is thick indeed. Despite Magritte’s assertion, we still say the painting is a pipe. The representation is the object. This is the native logic behind the “idols” of old—to capture an image is to somehow to encompass some of the essence. This is precisely why the Hebrew Bible forbids images to be made.

I realize that “essence” is a disputed concept these days. Some scientists have declared that no such thing exists, along with souls, deities, and free will. Nevertheless, most mornings I wake up aware that I am me and not you, that my physical body is relatively near where I last remember it being, and that it faces the same hopes and limitations it did the day before and before and before. Perhaps this continuity is an illusion, but I can’t afford to treat it as such. It’s hard for an identity-less person to hold down a job. As usual, it is money that comes back to define us.

We recognize that it is disrespectful to mistreat representations of what we hold sacred. Does Jesus suffer any real harm for his image laid out on the ground? The nuance necessary to separate likeness from reality is something we obviously possess, but as we deal with the physical world the distinction frequently fades. Religion may have lost much of its explanatory value for the material world we inhabit, but images of a fallen savior demonstrate that we still operate otherwise. Much of our religious life concerns appearances. And for many people that step between appearances and reality is a very small step indeed.

Whirling Spirits

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A photograph and video of a “fire tornado” in Australia have been lighting up the web the last few days. Well, technically there is no such thing as a fire tornado, although that term serves perfectly well as a colloquial expression for the phenomenon. Having spent several years studying vortices for a project on weather language in the Bible, I came to know tornados particularly intimately. Dust devils, caused by surface heating, look and act like tornados, but a true tornado is cloud-based. The fire tornado is probably better termed a “fire whirl” or a “fire devil”—an expression that has a particularly ominous tone. Such vortices occur in wildfires in other parts of the world as well, and they are, obviously, very dangerous. When my wife pointed out the comments on this site (which also has a photograph and a link to the video), however, the implications for a blog on religion became clear.

One of the points I made in my weather work was that severe weather is almost always attributed to God. The comments on boingboing affirm that the concept retains its currency. Now, reading comments on most websites reveals just how juvenile the web readership generally is. On many sites the comments are so annoying that even Spongebob Squarepants would seem an intellectual heavyweight by comparison with the writers. Nevertheless on boingboing, by comment seven God had been brought into the conversation. In this instance, reference was aptly made to the movie The Ten Commandments, with others chiming in that nature here far outdid Cecil B. DeMille’s efforts at a realistic fire devil to represent God. The comments then move on to the guiding of the Israelites by a pillar of fire in the wilderness. Intermingled with the biblical references are meteorological comments attempting to classify the whirl a bit more precisely.

When something out of the ordinary occurs, our default seems to be God. This in no way discounts the scientific discussion for what is really going on. The religion and science comments simply talk past one another—they have the same referent, but entirely different levels of engagement with it. Although not the scientific names, “devils” and “tornados” represent different, if visually similar, phenomena. Vortices seem natural on a round planet that follows a round orbit while rotating swiftly on its axis, and yet they remain comparatively rare. The name “dust devil” probably goes back to indigenous traditions associating the whirls with ghosts or spirits. For Christians encountering these concepts, heathen gods were devils (as is evident in the name Devil’s Lake, Wisconsin, named “Spirit Lake” by the Native Americans. The same applies to Devil’s Lake, North Dakota, but I haven’t been there.) It seems to me that these vortices neatly summarize religious sensibilities: an awe-inspiring event is one culture’s deity, another culture’s devil, and a third culture’s natural phenomenon empirically explained.

A real tornado

Dearly Beloved

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Coptic Christians have been in the news recently. In a late push to be known as the radical orthodox, it seems, the Copts have arrested the headlines. Tensions in the Middle East appear to have shifted to this ancient group and the media finds itself fascinated by them. In an unrelated development, a Coptic papyrus fragment appears to mention Jesus’ wife, according to CNN’s Belief Blog. Naturally, people are curious (read “upset”) at this revelation, although it is not history, just tradition. For decades, perhaps centuries, scholars of Christianity have noted that Jewish guys Jesus’ age would have been, by all social expectations, married. Celibacy was not really an option in the first century of the common era, and yet, no one explicitly mentions Jesus’ wife. This causes a larger crisis for divinity, because once Jesus was recognized as divine what would you do with a wife? She would complicate things (or at least theology).

The female divine is certainly as ancient as the male divine, culturally speaking, if not older. Despite cartoons of Cro-Magnon man dragging Cro-Magnon woman by the hair, all indications are that early people revered the feminine mystique as life-givers. Naturally, this equates to a kind of divinity. Only when society grew to be dominated by politics, no matter how primitive, did the male usurp the role of life-giving image-of-god-bearer. The male part in procreation was upgraded to being the creator, and the female relegated to a mere receptacle. Male gods alone could create universes, and women were downgraded to incomplete men. Still, in the myths around Israel (and perhaps within Israel as well) gods were married. The divine principle included both genders, although in an unequal distribution of power.

Fast forward twenty centuries and we have movements that encourage young women to consider Jesus as a kind of chaste lover. That’s a little hard to do if he was married—issues of adultery, at least in fantasy land, cause a real complication. The fact of history is that we possess very little of Jesus’ biography. Depending on how we parcel out the Gospels, we know only about one year’s worth (or three very scant years) of his life. Many personal details are left out. The Bible is clear that he had brothers and sisters, and even some of their names are preserved. We know his parents and find out that he was a cousin of John the Baptist. The relationships likely continued from there into other connections, but they weren’t central to the story the Gospel-writers wanted to tell. Adding women always complicates a male religion. Only non-gendered religions can be truly universal.

So this newly translated Coptic fragment comes from centuries later when it would seem natural that any Jewish man of the time would have been married. What was his wife’s name? Here’s the beauty of the revelation: for that, we can still offer the consolation, “fill in the blank.”

Rounding up the usual suspects?

Edeniana

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“On Jordan’s stormy banks I stand, and cast a wishful eye”—so begins a hymn I learned as a child and which has followed me to Bloomington, Indiana. Campus visits are an expectation of some academic editors, and as I stand and look at Jordan River on the Indiana University campus, I can’t help but feel a little disappointed. I have no idea if this little stream was named after the Jordan River of Israel fame, or if it just happens that someone named Jordan was a benefactor of the university. Given that there is a Jordan Hall, and a Jordan Street, the latter seems likely. Nevertheless, whether liquid or liquidity, any Jordan in contemporary society probably traces its origins back to the river that now separates Israel from Jordan (named after the river). Many hymns celebrate the mighty Jordan without the benefit of geographical experience. The mythic river is not mighty or majestic, but a slow-moving artery that sluggishly empties into the Dead Sea. With all the history of Christian imagination, however, we like to think of it on a par with the Euphrates, or at least the Mississippi.

Jordan’s stormy banks

Biblical images have a way of catching the imagination. Although many younger people have no training in the Bible or Christianity, our culture is steeped very thoroughly in it. For some who are just rising to voting age, it must appear incredible the amount of effort politicians still put into keeping the old faith alive. It is clearly so here in Indiana. Driving down from Indianapolis I passed many signs that the Biblio-Christic pulse still throbs in the heartland. As I stopped to check my directions, I realized I’d just parked across from Pray Street. In a land where an imperative verb for a religious function stands a chance of becoming a street name, anything is possible.

After I returned from my trip to Israel many years ago, I realized that I’d neglected to take any pictures of the Jordan River. It runs like a leitmotif through our national imagination that it almost seems worth going back just to snap a shot or two. The Jordan is redolent of Eden, a land that is, according to Genesis, defined by four rivers. Water is a precious commodity in the arid Middle East. Its fluid nature seems not to have achieved the level of metaphor for those who insist on warring over religion. For gardens to bloom, there must be water and its short supply raises tensions. Water connects, however, just as readily as it separates. One of the first steps towards the great civilizations was the technology of travel by water. Why can we no longer use it for connecting rather than gerrymandering? I don’t know why this little stream is called Jordan River, but I do stand by its banks and cast a wishful eye.

Mermaid Missionary

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Last summer I was invited to address a church in Princeton about Christian themes in the movies. Back in my seminary days I often presented biblical material at adult forums, but my interest in religious themes in movies has grown over the years. I don’t claim to be an expert, but I have watched secular movies with an eye toward religiosity since I was in high school. The day of the presentation followed a recent viewing of Pirates of the Caribbean: On Stranger Tides. Although I’ve posted on it before, that particular movie is among the most heavily freighted with Christian themes of any I’ve seen. Now that I’ve had a chance to watch it again on the small screen without the distractions of getting home through traffic afterward, I would redouble my assertions. The very premise of the movie—the hope for eternal life—is a decidedly Christian refrain and the pirates, who wear their sins on their sleeves, are eager to attain it. The missionary, mentioned in my previous post on the film, serves as a kind of foil for that theme, insisting that all souls can be redeemed. Except, he decides, Blackbeard’s.

The reason that Blackbeard falls out of the missionary’s personal book of life is his mistreatment of a mermaid. Now the swarming, man-eating mermaids are among the most memorable images from the story. One has to be captured to unlock the magic of the Fountain of Youth, and the victim happens to be the missionary’s mermaid. In a Florence Nightingale moment, the two different species fall in love—celibate preacher and heathen, mythological creature. An odd couple indeed. Carried in a glass coffin filled with water, the mermaid also needs air to survive and the heartless pirates don’t really much care. To save the little mermaid from asphyxiation, Philip shoves his Bible into the gap he breeched between coffin and lid, saving the fishwife’s life. Talk about conversion!

When the glass coffin breaks, spilling all the water, the mermaid is reborn as a human. Echoes of Splash come to mind here, as well as Disney’s earlier effort, The Little Mermaid. The transformation in this case, seems spiritual as well as physical. Syrena, whose very name invokes the classical sirens, is the one who delivers the magical chalices (communion, anyone?) to Jack Sparrow to save the life of Angelica, or, more likely, to bring Blackbeard to an end. Our busy mermaid, now transformed again to her fishly form, saves the injured missionary by converting him to her way of life under the waves. There are shades of Lovecraft here as well as a reversal of Ariel’s fate in Little Mermaid. Although critics were harsh on this movie where a comic character now takes on a serious role, I still find it compelling. Nearly all the main characters undergo transformations as the story unfolds and whether heathenish or not, almost everyone ends up a better Christian of one sort or another.

Magic Bibles

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With autumn not far down the road, my mind turns to scary things. Actually, it is that way quite a bit of the time. Nevertheless, movies about farms are often the setting for the creepy—the sense of isolation, the sharp implements farmers use, the rustling of the drying crops in the wind. A couple years back I watched The Messengers. As a horror film it had a number of good scares, but the menace always seemed somewhat restrained. Nothing profound happens, and it is a film fairly easily forgotten. It was a rainy Saturday afternoon and The Messengers 2: the Scarecrow suggested itself to me. I began watching in an ambivalent mood, but when the first scene began with the protagonist (whose name I’ve forgotten) dropping his Bible on the porch chair as he loosens his tie to work on a derelict water pump, I was curious. When his wife arrives home and asks why he left church before it was over, my interest grew. This direct-to-video prequel turned out to be a cut-budget horror flick based squarely on a religious parable.

In a faustian moment of abandon, and at the advice of a jocular neighbor named Jude (Iscariot, anyone?), our hero erects a scarecrow to try to improve his lot (literally). To give credit where it is due, the scarecrow is distinctly disturbing. The scene of John (okay, I looked it up) nailing the scarecrow to the cross is clearly a crucifixion scene, and the blood that will later appear at the foot of the cross bears this out. Before he realizes that the scarecrow is evil, John hears ghostly children singing in his cornfield. The song is “Jesus Loves Me.” There is a strong fertility goddess theme running through the film and when Jude reveals that his wife has a magic book that explains all the benefits of the scarecrow, John decides to cut it down. The scarecrow, predictably, resurrects.

Meanwhile, John’s Christian family thinks he has gone insane. Or worse, backslidden. As he tries to explain to his wife what has happened, John shows her the magic book and she insists “It’s just your old Bible,” and it is. Heathenish occult instruction transubstantiates into Christian scripture. It is tough to tell one sacred writing from another. For cut-rate horror fodder, this is wonderful commentary on religious sensibilities. Although straight-to-video movies are not high art, and will never receive academy award nominations, they do reflect popular religious beliefs. Scholars are now in search of such beliefs in ancient societies since “official religion” almost never reflects what actual hoi polloi think. Lived religion seldom conforms to the intricacies envisioned by religious founders, and yet it is out there on the Internet for all to see. Maybe the messengers in this film are not the crows after all. The point of the parable? Stay true to your Christian upbringing or else the scarecrow will get you.

Ring

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Absence of evidence is not evidence of absence. So goes a trite little statement meant to calm the fears of new students of biblical studies who worry that the historical record for biblical events is so sparse. The professor can head off many confrontations by declaring that such-and-such an event could have happened, but if it did it left no mark on the historical record. As I was watching the Japanese movie Ringu last night, I wondered about the apparent absence of religious imagery or themes. I am fully aware that not all horror movies have religious components, but the juxtaposition of religion and fear is so common in the western world that it often shows up in scary movies. I wondered if this translated to other cultures or not. Ringu is a decidedly creepy ghost story that creates considerable tension with little gore and not much in the way of special effects. The social commentary is evident even without the benefit of first-hand knowledge of the culture. The paranormal pervades the film.

Christianity is the matrix of many scary movies made in a North American, or even European, context. Although I have read about Buddhism and Shinto, and even occasionally taught courses on “World Religions,” my knowledge of eastern religious traditions is admittedly still quite basic. I can usually spot a biblical allusion a country mile away, but subtleties of foreign religions are harder to discern. Although many religions coexist in the United States the overall context is still Christian—there can be no doubt for anyone who follows politics. Japan is, like America, largely secular. The religious base, however, tends to involve both Shinto and Buddhism and I’m not sure which, if either, forms the recognizable “religious” basis of the collective consciousness. In many ways “religion” only applies to the Judeo-Christo-Islamic model. Much could have been transpiring in Ringu that I simply missed.

After the first mysterious death in the film a short sequence of a family in mourning is shown. Clearly this is what we in the western world would consider a religious context. The decision to try to calm the avenging ghost by uncovering her murdered corpse also conforms to what we might term religion. The fact is, these are very human concerns. Religions throughout the world treat death with a religious reverence since it is the great mystery of the living. Religion frustrates many scientists just for the fact of its mysteriousness. So, does Ringu revolve around religious fear? I don’t know. With the karmic implications of the story-line I would suggest that maybe it does. I’ll remain agnostic on the point, however. The same goes for the absence of evidence is not evidence of absence. Is it or isn’t it?