Protest Day

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Today should be known as Protest Day.  Three years ago with over a million others I marched in Washington.  The media still routinely underreports the numbers there, despite the metrics used on the ground.  “They’re only women,” it seems to say.  I marched the last two years in New York City.  The protest can never stop.  Once a democracy has opened the door to evil, it can never rest again.  It’s cold outside.  There’s a winter storm in the forecast.  Women everywhere are out marching.  This mansplained world must come to an end.  We must hear all voices.  Despite having control of all branches of government, the Trump message isn’t being heard.  Perhaps there is justice in nature.  I like to believe it, even when it’s hard.

Patriarchalism wears many disguises, such as biblicism.  If all you take from the Good Book is the idea that men are more important, then you’ve missed the point.  The Bible is a book with a context and those who can quote it without knowing what it originally meant are left wondering why so many other Christians disagree.  The message must be heard.  Liberation theologians long ago realized that Jesus’ gospel had been drowned in the voices of legalism.  They did what we all should be doing today; they protested.

Signs of national and international weariness are everywhere evident.  Trump-supporting senators strike out with ad hominem attacks for all reason has failed them.  Used to be if you aided and abetted a criminal you’d get in trouble.  Now you just get bumped to a more influential committee.  So we protest.  History hasn’t forgotten Watergate.  It will never forget the disaster of 2016 when a political party sold its soul.  

A restaurant not far from here is owned and operated by a young woman.  A sign on the register says “The Future Is Female.”  I hope it’s so.  Our hunter-gatherer sensibilities have been suborned by the possibilities of agricultural surplus.  Where there’s surplus there’s mammon to be made.  In the Middle Ages mammon became the name of a demon.  Today it’s inscribed on the hearts of those who follow cash, no matter where it may lead.  Once upon a time a man from Galilee said the wealthy wouldn’t inherit the kingdom.  Like Caesar they dedicate the temple to themselves.  We may not all be able to get out to march today, but we can make our consciences heard.  Women deserve every right men have.  It’s time to learn to share.  Until that happens, we must protest. 

The Truth Lies

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I recently saw a Trump supporter claiming, unsurprisingly, that everyone’s lying except Trump.  Of course, I could be lying.  According to the Washington Post, Trump has made over 13,000 lying or deceitful statements since being in office.  For those who did their homework before he became the great protector of the unborn (ah, there’s one born every minute!) he was known as a crooked businessman to begin with.  With well over a thousand lawsuits against him even before being elected, we have no choice but to believe the entire legal system is lying, as well as anyone who’s had business dealings with him.  I’m just so glad that we have such a moral, upstanding paragon of Christ-like behavior in the Oval Office.  Never mind that all those witnesses in the impeachment case were speaking under oath—they all lie, but Trump.  Hey Donald, is that your real hair?

Ironically, some of the people making such claims hold the belief that divorce is not excused in the gospels (see Matthew 5:32, but Jesus could’ve been lying here—he’s not Donald Trump, after all).  It’s a matter of public record that Trump is twice divorced.  It’s a matter of sworn legal testimony that he paid hush-money to cover up affairs while married.  Well, that is if we believe this lying world rather than the one, solid, shining bastion of truth in the White House.  Someone once said (but he may have been lying) that it is easier for a camel to pass through an eye of a needle that for a rich man to get into heaven.  Just sayin’.

I have said before that all politicians lie.  It comes with the territory and only the most naive among us don’t accept that fact.  There is a difference, however, between the occasional mistruth and a lifetime, documented record of indiscriminate lying.  If it weren’t for the fact that all facts are lies (except those Trump makes up) we would see that the phenomenon of pathological lying is well known.  The presidency of the United States has never before tolerated a pathological liar.  But then again, they never had an incumbent more Christian than Jesus himself.  Now I think I remember who made that crack about rich guys.  He also said something about having no place to lay his head.  If he’d been born rich, though, you can bet the gospel message would’ve been very different.  Too bad the Bible lies.  If it didn’t such musings as this would hardly be necessary.  I could be lying, of course.  It is, after all, the new truth.

Shortest Day

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This is it.  It’s here.  Today marks the winter solstice, the longest night.  Those who campaign to keep Christ in Christmas prefer not to acknowledge that the date of said holiday was an attempt to displace Sol Invictus, the Roman (therefore pagan) celebration of the invincible sun.  The Romans, like other ancient peoples, celebrated the return of light, albeit slowly, from darkness.  While teaching at Nashotah House a colleague mentioned being “almost pagan” in the eagerness for the return of light.  You can strike the “almost.”  Deep down we all look for signs of hope in dark times, whether Christian, Muslim, or Hindu.  “The people who walked in darkness,” Isaiah rejoiced, have seen light.  Sometimes light comes from an unexpected quarter.

There are two high circulation Christian magazines: Christianity Today and The Christian Century.  The latter is more progressive and was launched as an answer to the former.  One of the founders of Christianity Today was Billy Graham and its readership is largely evangelical.  Just yesterday Christianity Today ran an editorial stating the opinion that Trump should be removed from office.  If I were a card-carrying member of the Republican Church, I’d be trembling.  Long touted as “Trump’s base” evangelical Christians have found themselves besieged by the flagrant and constant contradictions their party has thrown them.  Fear of divorce was enough to keep at least one woman I know in an abusive relationship for years.  Now a thrice-married, philandering man who pays hush money to keep his affairs secret is upheld as the new Messiah.  Many of us who grew up evangelical were certain that their old tribe simply wouldn’t cotton onto a straw man.  But  cotton they did.  They’ve become the very lint in his miserly pockets.

Those encrusted with hardcore hatred, of course, will not be swayed.  They’ve found a poster boy who says it’s okay to claim white male supremacy.  They can pick their political issues (usually having to do with protecting the unborn or the right to shoot those already born) and they can be certain that this protean protestant will have their posteriors.  Their leadership, however, has begun to show itself clearsighted.  Christianity Today is no friend of liberal Christianity.  The editorial makes it clear that Democrats had it in for Trump from the beginning.  There is, however, absolutely clear evidence of his crimes.  Even as southern senators state outright that they have no interest in seeing a fair trial, their base is speaking up.  Tonight is the longest night of the year.  Tomorrow it will be a little bit lighter than today.  At this time of year we fervently hope that the light will continue to grow.

Fearful Faithful

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It’s sitting on the table next to my chair and I’m afraid of it.  It all started during the Easton Book Festival.  I feel sorry for those people who have to stand on the street corner and pass things out for a job.  In Manhattan I used to see them being completely ignored by swarms of people passing by.  They’re only doing their job.  I made a habit of accepting their chits, and even if they didn’t mean anything to me, I felt that the person handing them out might have experienced a small measure of satisfaction that someone accepted what they were offering, and had said “thank you.”  In Easton back in October, my wife and I were heading to one of the venues to hear an author talk and a guy was passing out paper, and I accepted one as a matter of habit.

It was a Chick tract.  If you’ve been reading this blog a while you’ll have run across the concept before.  Jack T. Chick was a cartooning evangelist.  He drew hundreds of tracts and comic books that formed a steady diet for me, growing up.  Although they looked like cartoons, these intolerant, Fundamentalist tracts were quite often very scary.  Especially to the young.  More than once I’d spiral into a childhood depression after reading one.  Although it seemed simple—say the prayer at the end and you’d be saved—how could you be so sure?  The disturbing contents stayed with me long after the sixteen pages were done.  Now, as an adult, I was being offered a road back to a childhood I fervently wished to avoid.

I stuck the tract in my pocket and forgot about it.  When I got home I emptied my pockets and found it again.  Curious, I was tempted to read it.  I know, however, that doing so will only drag me back to a memory of younger days when a kind of terror permeated my days.  And nights.  My theology, which was formed of a mosaic of these tracts (what child really listens to sermons?), was a scary one indeed.  It was populated by demons, Catholics, and servants of the Antichrist.  Anyone who wasn’t straight and pretty waspish was a threat to my eternal salvation.  Is that somewhere I want to go again?  The tract sits, unread, on my table.  It reminds me of the abuses to which religion might be put.  And I’m thinking I might start refusing free handouts on the street once again.

I Swear

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The ongoing political fiasco of our nation (and within several states as well), raises a very basic issue.  We trust our legislators to do what we pay them to do (they’re our employees) because they take an oath to uphold the Constitution.  Problem is, liars don’t keep their word.  When an elected official opts to lie pathologically rather than to tell the truth, how can we expect him (or her) to uphold an oath they took?  Doesn’t lying behavior suggest that they were lying when they took that oath?  A hand on the Bible means nothing if you don’t suppose God is waiting with a lightning bolt in the metaphorical Heaven described, none too clearly, in the Good Book.  This is the greatest crisis a democracy can possibly face—lying leaders.

This isn’t just alarmist talk.  Societies—even capitalistic ones—rely on a great deal of trust.  Those who don’t mean what they say end up on the business end of the Better Business Bureau, or fail to stay solvent.  There are laws that ensure you are protected if someone sells you a false bill of goods.  What then, if the highest office in the land is occupied by someone who can’t be trusted?  Instead of appealing to the rule of law to set such a person on the right path, the Republican (Church) Party has decided that lying is now a commandment.  I may be lying, but how can you tell?  If no one has the backbone to stand up and declare that the whole system has toppled, what can a nation do?  An even more worrisome fact is that there’s no going back once this has happened.  The Republican Church has instilled this behavior for three years and is showing no sign of repentance.

Oaths were taken very seriously in the world of the Bible.  Violating one (lying intentionally) was considered the surest way to arouse God’s anger.  Ironically the Republican Church, which claims to be biblically based, is, according to its own Scripture, angering God.  I often consider myself a cynic, but my cynicism falls far short of this.  Psychological studies have demonstrated that the average person is reluctant to outright lie when the idea of God is introduced into conversation.  God’s Own Party, however, has inured itself to that minor phobia.  The Good Book, after all, says God’s the father of lies, right?  If they’d bother to open that book they’re thumping, I think they’d discover that that is truthfully the worst kind of blasphemy a human can utter.

Focus on Religion

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Publishers Weekly, or PW to those in the biz, is a great place to get information about, well, publishing.  I often spend AAR/SBL telling authors and prospective authors something that I wish I’d been told when teaching: time spent learning about publishing is never wasted.  PW every year has a “Religion and Spirituality Update” released in time for this meeting.  Despite the relatively small number of sales, religion is a discipline that loves its books.  I’ve only been quoted in PW’s special edition once, and it’s not been for a few years, nevertheless I always learn a thing or two from this free—yes, if you’re here in San Diego it’s free!—update.  It may seem odd to suggest that religion titles can be hot, but it is indeed possible.  Sexuality is hot.  I suppose that goes without saying.

A number of titles dealing with religion and sexuality appear every year.  What caught my attention, however was an observation from Jennifer Banks, from Yale University Press.  Noting the rancor that sexuality often introduces to discussions of religion, she observes that (and this is a quote from PW, not directly from Banks) “some Christians apparently need others to go to hell.”  (I can send the full citation, if you want to know.)  In an era when academics have been stressing inclusion, the retrenched religious world has been spinning in the opposite direction.  Instead of inviting everyone to Heaven, as might, say a Universalist, many conservative Christians consign fellow believes to Hell, and gleefully so.  It’s almost as if Christianity and capitalism have merged into a zero-sum game.  If some win, all the others have to lose.  They haven’t however, studied the history of Hell very well.

It’s kind of an insidious idea.  Given that we all want to justify ourselves, some go to the extremes of demonizing those who see things differently.  This form of religious thinking was original neither with Christianity nor the Judaism from which it grew.  There was no Hell in the Hebrew Bible.  The idea, when it did develop, wasn’t a place to torture your enemies, but rather a place demanded by justice.  Those who were utterly and unrepentantly wicked couldn’t hobnob in God’s country club with those who tried to be righteous.  In the modern evangelical narrative those who make certain medical decisions for basic human situations are among the utterly wicked.  Not surprisingly their sins are usually sexual.  If you want to see this in a wider context, pick up a PW when you pass by the stand.  “Anything free,” to quote another sage, “is worth saving up for.”  And who knows, it might keep you from Hell?

The Happy Science

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Many seem to be wondering, if the media are to be believed, why America, like REM, is losing its religion.  (And yes, I know that the expression for the latter means to lose one’s temper, not literally to lose one’s faith.)  Derek Thompson at the Atlantic recently wrote about how the more literal loss took place around 1990.  He posits that the rise of the Christian Right, the Cold War coming to an end, and 9/11 are behind the loss.  As an historian of religion, even with a more ancient focus, I have to wonder if his gaze goes back far enough.  Being born early in the sixties was an opportunity to have a front-row seat.  My family was very religious.  To us, the rest of the world may have been going to Hell, but locally we were trying to please God, as most everyone we knew was.

Theologians and sociologists thought God had died.  Nietzsche, always ahead of his time, had declared as much nearly a century before the sixties got underway.  The public face of religion, however, is never the same as what’s going on below.  The religious right was built on a deep-seated hypocrisy from the beginning.  Now hypocrisy is so very human it’d be easily forgiven were it not for the constant insistence on self-righteousness followed by the revelation of some base human vice.  Time and time again televangelists didn’t cover the tracks of their peccadillos well enough, and Catholic priest couldn’t fight that feeling.  They were doing what humans have probably always done, but while wearing the vestments of public respectability.  Like Cthulhu, it seemed like God was dead but dreaming under the sea.

Religion, as all scholars of the phenomenon know, changes only very slowly.  Church attendance began dropping in the seventies, but back then there was such a thing as the rule of law and a real concern that your neighbors didn’t think you a Commie.  Fast forward to the era of Trump when the rule of law broke down completely and religions rank right up there with Republicans as being the most dishonest elements of humankind.  We look back at when the slow trickle seemed to breech the dyke in the 1990s.  The real game changer (since 9/11 was still in the future) was the birth of the internet.  People began to talk freely about the two subjects—religion and politics—that those of us from the sixties were taught assiduously to avoid in polite company.  Nietzsche published Die fröhliche Wissenschaft in 1882.  It would take about a century to sink in, and human religious leaders would be the ones to prove his point.  At least in this world of choosing our confessions.

Outdated Commandments

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Recently, according to an ABC story a friend sent me, some self-righteous Catholics stole indigenous statues from the Amazon from a location in Rome.  The statues had been a gift to the Pope and placed outside the church of Santa Maria in Traspontina.  Like mass shooters these days, the Christians responsible filmed themselves doing this and shared it on social media.  I’ve experienced a lot of religious intolerance in my life.  I lost my job and my childhood to it, among other things.  Stories like this are beyond sad because religion really does have the capacity to bring people together rather than to tear them into warring factions.  Unfortunately it tends to draw in the hateful looking for excuses for their violence.

Not unrelatedly, I attended a church program on gun violence.  Before this gets immediately blown up into “anti-gun,” please note—the program was about violence, not guns.  During the Q&A after the presentation someone asked who the panelists were trying to reach, “preaching to the choir.”  After that he admitted to being a gun owner and felt that his position was unfairly represented.  Tension mounted.  One of the panelists, the one who’d witnessed his first murder at age 11, and who’d spent time in jail himself, broke in and said “This is about violence, let’s not make it about guns.”  I was struck by his focus and control.  He’d told us earlier that if a gang member could be convinced to wait 24 hours before getting his gun after an insult or injury a shooting almost never took place.  Violence is often a spur of the moment thing.

What’s so troubling about those who smirk as they film themselves doing violence, like stealing statues outside a church, is that this is not an impulse act.  This is planned, hateful violence.  It wears the mask of religion, often titled “orthodoxy” or “conservatism” but it is in reality simply a way of excusing your hatred.  Ironically, the Jesus they claim to be following said, “Let the one without sin throw the first stone.”  I guess we’ve got quite a few sinless conservatives out there, although I have to wonder if filming yourself might not count as pride.  It used to be called a deadly sin, but who’s counting?  Self-righteousness isn’t quite the same thing as vanity, although they sleep in the same bed.  But let’s not get lust involved, once that happens there’ll be no telling one sin from another.

Panic at the Bookstore

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Usually it works like this.  I go into a used bookstore with a list of titles I’d like to find.  Yes, I know I can look them up on Amazon and pay some price gouger more than the book’s worth, but you sometimes find things forgotten on a shelf out of the reach of technology.  When I went into a used bookstore in the vicinity of Ithaca last month I didn’t have my list with me.  When I visit such a store, especially the first time, I don’t like to walk out empty-handed.  The word “Exorcism” on both the spine and cover of Ken Olson—excuse me, Dr. Ken Olson’s book on the subject, well, how could I not?  Exorcism: Fact or Fiction? is published by Thomas Nelson.  That immediately told me something of what the book would be like.  It wouldn’t be an academic treatment, and it would be somewhat evangelical.  Still, I didn’t have my list with me.

Olson hasn’t had an easy life.  His license to practice psychology was revoked after he performed an exorcism and my sympathies are always with those who have lost jobs.  Rejection is, after all, a form of violence.  The book, however, isn’t so much about exorcism as it is about evangelical views of it.  Written around the time of the satanic panic in the 1990s, the book takes seriously the claims of the alleged victims and also the physical existence of the non-corporeal Satan.  This actually leads to a few logical brick walls.  Referring to the body parts of non-physical beings can be an exercise in metaphor, but evangelicals tend to be literalists otherwise.  This discrepancy begs for discussion but receives none here.

The history of moral panics is interesting.  We live in the midst of them pretty much constantly now.  The internet doesn’t really help.  Moral panics are times when particular concerns spread rapidly (for which the web is ideal) without having any critical questions asked.  They often lead to a mob mentality that can victimize the innocent.  Although that’s clearly not his intent, Olson’s book tends to do this too.  If a victim is female, as is often the case, conservatives blame her for such things as abortions, forgetting, it seems, that a male was involved.  Since abortion scares are another example of a moral panic, it’s not surprising Olson treats them along with other forms of spiritual warfare.  Those who turn to the book looking for The Exorcist will be disappointed.  You might find a copy of that, however, at your local used bookstore.

Influential Brethren

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Outsized ideas from under-recognized sources always captivate me.  I have to admit that my own childhood fascination concerning, and fear of, “the rapture” still haunts me.  While our house isn’t large, the other day I couldn’t see or hear my wife anywhere when I knew she was home and my first thought was that she’d been raptured and I’d been left behind.  Please don’t try to console me with logic; I know very well the problems with this initial assessment and knowing the history of the idea of the rapture can’t stop the primal fear when it strikes.  So it is with religious ideas inculcated in the young.  That’s why I knew I had to read Massimo Introvigne’s The Plymouth Brethren as soon as I heard of it.  The Plymouth Brethren, and specifically one of their formative leaders, John Nelson Darby, were the inventors of the rapture.

Introvigne’s book doesn’t trace rapture history (other books do that), but he does narrate, in an admirably succinct treatment, whence the Brethren arose.  In the nineteenth century in the British Isles, some were very concerned that Christianity had gone off the rails.  Accommodating with secular society, it had become heavily doctrinal and, worse, political.  Breakaway groups were common, including those who went back to the “Bible alone” as the basis for assessing what being Christian truly was.  The Plymouth Brethren developed in this atmosphere and they still remain a relatively small Christian sect (I use that term completely neutrally).  Even though they themselves splintered over time, they were never a very large group.  They, however, invented the rapture.

John Nelson Darby, one of the founders of the movement, believed history was divided into dispensations, or periods, predetermined by God.  The dispensation in which we now live (and in which they lived two centuries ago) would include a dramatic rapture that would allow Darby’s understanding of eschatology to fall within the system he developed.  This idea was picked up by Cyrus Scofield and included in his enormously influential Scofield Reference Bible.  That Bible, although many evangelicals considered the Plymouth Brethren as a kind of “cult,” was used as the unquestioned roadmap for the end times.  It was picked up by such promoters as Hal Lindsey and Timothy LaHaye and made into a meme that just about any educated person recognizes.  We all know what “the rapture” is, although the Bible itself doesn’t spell it out at all.  Introvigne’s book is very informative on the Brethren but his chapter on their ten main divisions is, necessarily, a touch confusing.  Well balanced and fair, this is a great source for those who wonder who these people were that gave us such worries when our wives have “disappeared” into some other part of the house.

Anthropocene

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The word “Anthropocene” has been showing up quite a bit lately.  For a period of many years I was an avid, self-taught amateur geologist.  In my dreams I still am, I guess.  My interest in the ages of rocks began when I, like Charles Lyell, began to consider the implications of their extreme longevity.  The Bible, of course, famously intimates we live in a comparatively new neighborhood.  Having grown up believing that literally and firmly, and also having started a modest fossil collection, I failed to see the conflict.  I mean, there were fossils right down there by the river.  Tons of them.  Some Young Earth Creationists had already begun, by that point, to suggest they’d arisen because of Noah’s flood, but dinosaurs still seemed to be a problem.  In many ways rocks broke me out of my fundamentalist stupor.

While at Nashotah House I taught electives on Genesis 1-11.  I read about the geologic ages of the planet and would fall into Devonian dreams of a world entirely different from ours—a world in which there was no Bible for there were no humans to make God in their image.  I knew that we lived in the Quaternary Period of the Holocene Era.  I don’t think the term Anthropocene was in wide use then.  Parsing it is simple enough—it is the “human age.”  The age in which the planet was, has been, and is being altered by human behavior.   There’s no agreed-up start date for the Anthropocene, but it will likely be set in the twentieth century; the twentieth century in our way of counting.  There have been millions of centuries before that.

A couple of weekends back I attended a church program on plastics.  These useful polymers are deeply, deeply integrated into our lives and are promoted by the far too powerful petroleum industry.  The problem with plastics is that they break down and invade the bodies of animals and humans.  And although they do decompose it takes many centuries for them to do so.  Naming the Anthropocene is an effort to get us to see that a human perspective is far too brief to deal with the many issues we raise.  Our practices on this planet will likely not destroy the earth, but they may very well make it uninhabitable by us, or by creatures we like to see.  Life is persistent, and rock lasts for eons.  Even stone’s not eternal, however, and the idea of the Anthropocene is to get us to look at ourselves and realize that our use of this planet, as toxic as it is, is shortsighted.  We will someday be the fossils under a bridge long crumbled to dust for those in the future who know of no such thing as Genesis.  Perhaps we should act like it.

Conservation?

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I am not a conservative.  There, I’ve said it.  You have very little control over who your parents are or how they raise you.  As I confessed here many times, I was raised in a conservative Christian home of the fundamentalist stripe.  Like most kids scared of Hell I took it all very seriously.  It is the reason I followed the career path—or perhaps career swamp trek—that I have.  In any case, the other day I was looking through a Baker Academic catalogue.  Baker, in case you don’t follow the high drama of the publishing industry, is one of the many Christian publishing houses with roots in Grand Rapids, Michigan.  Like most publishers in that collective, it tends toward the conservative end of the theological spectrum.  As I flipped through I noticed bio after bio of authors with Ph.D.s from Edinburgh, Cambridge, and other prestigious universities in the United Kingdom.

I hadn’t been warned, you see.  Many conservatives who want a doctorate study in the UK because they can do so without taking all those classes that will make them examine the Bible critically.  That’s not why I went to Edinburgh, but I can see how it might look like that from the outside.  I went to Grove City College—a bastion of conservatism.  (I was raised that way, remember?)  My next educational move should give the lie to my attempt to remain conservative; Boston University School of Theology was considered the most liberal United Methodist seminary in the pre-Internet days.  I attended for that very reason.  Edinburgh, my true alma mater, was selected because they offered a scholarship that made it possible for a poor kid to finish a doctorate.  I wasn’t conservative when I went, and I wasn’t conservative when I came out.

I didn’t get the memo, I guess.  The sneaking suspicion that I might be conservative has dogged my career.  My dissertation can be read that way, but it’s not a conservative argument.  I merely suggested the decision to marry Yahweh off to Asherah was a bit hasty, based on the actual evidence.  I’m all for married deities—they tend to be less frustrated toward humanity.  Maybe the Almighty could speak to Mrs. God about correcting these worries about what I “really believe.”  I went to a conservative college to learn—there were a fair number of attempts to indoctrinate there, but if you thought about things you could see through them, even with a fundie upbringing.  But as I thumb through the catalogue I can see how perceptions can work against you, especially when your first job is at a conservative seminary, eh, Mrs. God?  

Mouse Trap

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The other day a friend asked me about theodicy.  Not in so many words, of course, but the question was distinctly familiar: why would an all-good, all-powerful deity let good people suffer?  My response, hurried as it had to be, coming as it did on a work day, was that this was the classic question that had led to the dismissal of much belief among those raised in the Christian tradition.  It is, if you will, the Achilles heel of the non-biblical unofficial trinity of omnipotence, omniscience, and omnipresence.  The answer typically given is that people have only a limited view and, given that we can’t see the whole picture we’re in no position to judge a being who can.  That got me thinking about the whole picture itself, and whether there is such a thing already in place.

As a young person learning to think theologically, I had to spend hours discussing with peers and teachers what this might mean.  Time, they would assure us, does not affect God.  The Almighty stands (metaphorically) outside of time and therefore understands how all of this will come out.  And the final result will be good.  The orthodox would then chime in that an eternal Hell was necessary to punish sins that, in comparison, lasted only a short time, comparatively.  This would raise the question of justice again, and whether or not we were all marionettes in a puppet-show that really excluded free will.  You see, the other answer to the question of theodicy is that if humans have free will a deity can’t force us to do good.  Humans, they reason are responsible for making the good suffer.

With the weather turning cooler, we caught a mouse the other day.  Decades ago I opted for a humane trap since it seems unspeakably arrogant of me to kill another sentient being who’s simply trying to find food and stay warm.  From the perspective of that mouse, I must seem terrifying.  I’ve caught it in a metal trap.  I’m a hundred times its size.  It has no idea what I’m thinking.  When I catch mice I try to talk to them reassuringly.  It’s got to be disorienting to find yourself going from “o wow, peanut butter!” to “I can’t get out.”  If that mouse is thinking of a higher power I know that I can’t see much of the larger picture.  My view is local, compared to that of larger intellects than mine.  Still, I don’t want that mouse to suffer for being what it is.  I didn’t create it, but I do want to set it free to let it find its place in both space and time.

The New Purple

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Those of us who grew up Evangelical hold an unusual place among our liberal peers.  We’re often able to peer around, over, and under that wall that has been built between those who want a faith-based nation and those who want a free one.  Angela Denker is a fellow traveler on this road, and her book Red State Christians: Understanding the Voters Who Elected Donald Trump is a useful roadmap.  Some of us fall further from the tree than others, but one of Evangelicalism’s more endearing traits, when taken seriously, is the love of those who are different from you.  That love is often forgotten in the political rhetoric daily whipped into a froth by an unstable president being used by his party to install agendas that hardly fit the moniker “Christian.”  That’s why books like this are so important.

I confess that reading studies such as this make me uncomfortable.  Uncomfortable because my Evangelical past haunts me worse than any ghost, but also because Denker is clearly right that basic humanity is being left in the garbage as battle lines are drawn up in what could be a great, diverse nation if a leader were determined to work for unity.  I recently wrote about lunar landings.  Kennedy was a Catholic who had to work to bring a nation together around a common goal.  Instead of tearing the country apart for his personal aggrandizement, he pointed to the moon.  Sure, there was a xenophobia concerning the Soviet Union, but at least in this pocket of the world there was a sense that we should work together.  When religion entered politics with Richard Nixon and his followers, a deep rift opened up.  The two topics you were never to discuss—religion and politics—were now in the same bed.

Red State Christians is an extended road trip on which Denker interviews people who largely fall under the Evangelical umbrella.  Some of them are Catholic.  Some of them are Hispanic.  Some of them are less concerned with social issues, but are hard-working laborers often overlooked by the Democratic Party.  The resulting pastiche is one in which Americans are cast not in sharp relief, but rather with the hazy edges that are a far more accurate way of understanding human beings.  Many, it becomes clear, elected Trump out of fear, or out of fear of his opponent.  These aren’t bad people, but they are people afraid.  This wasn’t an easy book to read, but it is an important one.  And those who want to work for a future that might include realms beyond the moon might find this work a small step in the right direction.

Somebody’s Coming

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Sometimes updates don’t help.  That’s because evil is so good at masquerading as righteousness that constant vigilance is required.  Michelle Goldberg’s Kingdom Coming: The Rise of Christian Nationalism was recommended to me by someone at a local church.  I’ve been giving educational talks to help people understand what Evangelicalism is, so I figured I’d better read it.  The optimistic epilogue to this otherwise excellent book allowed relief after the 2006 midterm elections.  Of course, nobody back then could’ve believed an even less intelligent president than W could ever be put forth by the GOP.  That doesn’t mean Kingdom Coming shouldn’t be read.  It should.  And it should be required reading (aw, gee!  Homework?).  There have been many studies that have demonstrated repeatedly that Christian Nationalism is highly organized and well funded.  Meanwhile intellectuals scoff that religion is dead.

I spent most of the last week in a kind of panic.  I have another public talk coming up, and I needed to read Goldberg before that.  Yes, it is dated.  But yes, we have Trump’s bumbling form of “leadership” with a well funded, highly organized Evangelical subculture calling the shots.  Forget the politicians—they’re only interested in money—it’s everyone else who suffers from America’s growing fascism.  The fact that the GOP won’t stand up to 45 shows that we’ve already turned the corner toward das Vaterland.  Anyone the Republican Party elects from now on could be the new dictator.  Christian Nationalism stands behind this as journalists scratch their heads.

Goldberg’s book has likely been shelved because eight years of Obama made it seem like the threat was gone.  The problem is, silence works to the benefit of Christian Nationalists.  Perhaps the most frightening thing about all of this is that many intellectuals simply don’t take the threat seriously.  At the same time I was reading this, I was also reading about Nazi Germany (because I’m such a cheerful guy).  The parallels are blatant and entirely too obvious to miss.  Christian Nationalism has an agenda and it is fascist in nature.  Even obeying the words of Jesus takes second place to the political objective of making America in their own image.  This may sound alarmist, but it’s based on solid information.  The Devil, they say, is most powerful when people don’t believe in him.  Those who would make America into a theocracy would claim to follow the other guy, but looking at their tactics, it’s pretty clear who’s really in charge.