Going In, Coming Out

Leave a comment

Being primates, perhaps it is no surprise that we are fascinated by who is doing whom. We, literally, by nature, find sexual alliances fascinating. Despite the fact that close observation of nature has indicated that homosexuality is indeed natural—it has been observed in many species, and isn’t even limited to mammals—we can’t help but make it a deciding factor in what an individual is. Two unrelated news stories over the past week have focused on homosexuality as the overwhelmingly defining trait of a person. In the first story, the Evangelical Lutheran Church of America (ELCA) has elected its first openly gay bishop. (Gay bishops, even in the pre-Reformation church, have not been exactly an endangered species.) The Rev. Dr. Guy Erwin, however, is so much more than a partnered gay man. He is a highly educated person who had held that most rare of positions—a bona fide academic position in higher education. He is also a member of the Osage Nation. His election as a Native American or as an academic would not be newsworthy. His orientation, well, that’s a whole different story.

Meanwhile, across the planet, the Southern Baptist Convention (SBC) is cutting its ties with the Boys Scouts of America because the BSA has decided to make honest men of its boys. BSA has recently voted to allow gay boys to remain in the Scouts, something that the Mormons had no problem accepting. Quite apart from the misguided SBC move, I was saddened to see CNN’s inaccurate headline, “Baptists plan exodus from Boy Scouts.” The story does not indicate that the Baptist brand of Christianity has withdrawn, so to speak, from BSA, but the Southern Baptist Convention. Baptists are much more broad-minded than the SBC brotherhood (I use the phallocentric collective intentionally) would indicate. All Baptists, it seems, are guilty by association.

SBC in the White House

SBC in the White House

People are complex. Putting them into neat categories is unfair to who a person really is. The category “gay” is notorious for subverting all other qualifiers for decent human beings. As the National Socialist Party recognized, the easiest way to build a case against a people is to put them together in a class that “deserves” our fear, mistrust, and hatred. Don’t look at the individual beneath the label. You might be forced to change your mind. Did that individual overcome the difficulties of being a “minority” in his or her own native land? Did that individual work hard to climb through the educational system to attain an advanced degree? Did that individual commit his or her life to another person, no matter what the social stigma? None of that matters, as long as we can talk about his or her “orientation.” It is society itself that requires reorientation.

Beyond Measure

1 Comment

Thinking back to my first course in World Religions, I recollect learning about Hinduism, Buddhism, Islam, and Confucianism for the first time. It is likely that Taoism was also mentioned, but I had to do a ton of research before I taught the course for the first time at Oshkosh. I remembered learning nothing about Sikhism or Shinto, not to mention Jainism or any host of religions boasting smaller numbers, by gosh. Now that I’m in the business of commissioning books on world religions, I have come into a quandary. As I know from experience, those who teach world religions are faced with a classic case of TMI: too much information. These religions I’ve mentioned only begin to scratch the vast surface of human religious expression, while your typical semester is only 14 weeks in duration. How do we cover all the smaller religions, some of which may have even a million or more adherents, and may be, at times, geared toward violent behavior? There’s simply no way.

This is where the quagmire grows thickest—are “major religions” quantified by numbers alone? From comments of readers of this blog it is quite clear that Christianity is no uniform religion. The differences go deeper than Protestant or Catholic or Orthodox. Most of us follow rather idiosyncratic blends of various religions we’ve experienced. It is not unusual for a Christian to practice yoga or to engage in meditation. And there are thousands of smaller religions as well, and the beliefs are deeply embedded in the lives of those who hold them. A good example would be Native American religions. There isn’t just one. Various tribes held their own beliefs and yet try to find a textbook that covers the differences between them. (Ah, but publishers are bound by the need to sell many copies to make such books profitable, and what professor is going to have the time to parse out different belief systems of these small, sometimes powerless groups?)

It is the curse of categorization. In our free market economy bigger is always better. Religions, on the other hand, do not always concern themselves with winning the most tricks. The Zoroastrians, who gave us the concepts of Heaven and Hell and much else that became standard theology in the monotheistic religions, continue to exist. In small numbers. So small that, as a religion major, I didn’t really learn about them until I began teaching classes exploring the origins of our modern religious concepts. When the modern eye assesses the importance of something, it does so by crunching the numbers. Religions have been our human means of seeking the truth since civilization began, perhaps even before. Often numbers and truth just don’t align.

California State of Mind

Leave a comment

California, it is sometimes said, is a state of mind. I leave today after a few days in Santa Barbara with a bag of mixed impressions of one of our nations great schools. My first impression on the University of California Santa Barbara campus was almost a physical one. Literally. I had no idea of the bicycle culture and nearly stepped into a bike lane with the flow of a New Jersey storm drain during a Nor’easter. California is a culture of wheels. I’d never been to a campus before that has four traffic lanes for non-motorized travel: two bike lanes going opposite directions, a skateboard lane, and the humble pedestrian walkway. There are so many skateboards here that the counter-culture has become conformist. Sorry, Bart, it’s true. And concern for the environment is palpable. Reclaimed rainwater feeds the lush plant life, every possible recycled item is sorted and sent to the correct facility, students bicycle instead of drive, smart cars are very evident for the two-wheel impaired, and almost nobody smokes. And as I ate my supper alone in the student union two separate groups of Christian students were having very vocal conversations about their faith. Free spirits not realizing that they’re trapped.

One conversation with a Native American specialist stayed with me. She spoke of how missionary work has damaged indigenous cultures irreparably. I listened in fascination as she told me about the local history. How an historic Spanish mission was publicly adorned with the skull of a murdered Native American and how it took years of persuading to get them to take it down, even in the late twentieth century. Across campus students are praying to Jesus for the courage to continue witnessing. In Newark, I suspect, a couple of guys are still laughing.

On a brief respite from my busy day of meetings, I walked the Lagoon (sorry, I can never see or say that word without thinking of Gilligan’s Island) Trail. Emphasizing the environmental features of this wetland habitat, the trail leads down to the ocean where flocks of pelicans and egrets fly overhead, unperturbed on the shores of the vast Pacific. In 1969 what had been to date the worst US waters oil spill took place from Platform A, still visible in the distance from the beach. My thoughts turn from Gilligan’s Island to Deepwater Horizon. My laughter to tears. The Lagoon Trail winds through the headland to a labyrinth. In today’s resurgence of interest in the labyrinth, it is viewed as a spiritual journey. Labyrinths appear in churches as early as the Roman Empire, but nobody knows what they mean. I silently stand beside the maze. What does it mean? Platform A leers from the ocean. Christian undergrads look to convert the world. And under the cross is not the skull of Adam, but that of an anonymous Native American. What does it mean?

Bibles and Broomsticks

Leave a comment

Continuing my musings on Kent Nerburn’s The Wolf at Twilight, I must pause for a moment on chapter eight, “Bibles and Broomsticks.” I must confess to having learned quite a bit in this account, and among the more disturbing facts is that government agents routinely removed Lakota children from their homes so that they would be sent to boarding schools to learn “white ways.” Many of these schools were run by Christian groups; in “Dan’s” case, the school was Roman Catholic. Confused and frightened, away from home, these children were compelled to give up their traditional ways so that they would be more accommodating to the people who had taken over their land. In the midst of the difficulties faced, Dan makes some pointed observations about the difference between what he had been taught as a child and what the establishment schools proclaimed. In punishment for speaking his own language, Dan was once sentenced to kneel on several marbles while holding a heavy Bible out at the end of each outstretched arm. Later he reveals that many of the children were sexually abused by the priests out on the prairie, far from the help of any non-religious adult.

Despite the grimness of this scenario, a parable may lurk for those of us who live in supposedly more enlightened times. The Bible being used as a physical weapon may be rare today, but it certainly has lost no force as a metaphorical one. We see this constantly when overly eager televangelists and politicians unilaterally declare that natural disasters are of divine origin, the god of the black book punishing the country he founded. Their logic twists like the rubber band on the balsam toy airplane of their mental depth. Complexity is the work of the devil when God can be blamed for every misfortune against those of whom they disapprove. The truly sad part is that they are continuing the oppression that was behind the mistreatment of the Native Americans. Books only enlighten minds when they are opened. Making a Bible into a cross is about as pagan an idea as can be conceived (my apologies to any pagans reading this—pagans are not nearly so barbarous).

At one point Dan explains to Nerburn that the Creator’s lessons could be found by observing nature, such as listening to the song of a bird. He said, “We could have taught your people, too. But they never listened…They just looked in their Black Book. They said it had everything they needed to learn the Creator’s lessons.” We are starting to learn this lesson, but very, very slowly. It was not by accident that the Navi in Avatar were portrayed as symbolic of Native Americans while the greedy industrialists mining their planet considered it manifest destiny to take charge. The Bible does not have all the answers. Those which it does contain in no way justify the abuse of others for one’s personal gain. It is one of history’s legitimate mysteries how an intelligent people can shut out reason when personal gain is at stake. It is easier to do, apparently, when there is a divine book to blame. When the Bible is used to punish others, however, it is always a safe bet that it has never been opened.

Differing worldviews

Who Are the Wolves?

4 Comments

Last week I finished reading The Wolf at Twilight by Kent Nerburn. To be transparent here, I’d picked up the book at a Borders’ closing sale based largely on the subtitle: An Indian Elder’s Journey through a Land of Ghosts and Shadows. It sounded like a good book for autumnal reading. The first chill breezes of fall swept through Manhattan last week, and I curled up with the book on the bus. I’m not sure what I expected, but what I found was nothing short of epiphanic. Those of us who’ve spent long years in religious studies, no matter what specific branch, know of the deeply spiritual writings of Native Americans. Black Elk Speaks is a classic often required in Religion 101 and it is still as potent today as it was back when first penned. The danger, which Nerburn clearly states, is in assuming a mystical kind of stereotype for a very real people who have continually been—and still are—hidden away as an embarrassment of the United States’ melting pot image.

The Wolf at Twilight is a follow-up to Nerburn’s Neither Wolf nor Dog, a book that I have not read. In that original narrative, Nerburn describes his encounters with “Dan,” a Native American, Lakota elder. The Wolf at Twilight is the story of how Dan finds closure in locating the resting place of his sister, from whom he was separated at childhood. The journey, spiritual though it may be, is a wrenching one. Speaking from my experience, many children grow up in America learning only cursory pieces of the large and tragic mosaic of how the Native Americans were treated by own government. The story of Dan is one of clashing worldviews where any system that stands against the ideal of private ownership—sadly embodied in the Christian settlers of this nation—is inevitably shredded, and, if embarrassing enough, hidden from future generations. Our ancestors did a great disservice to our fellow human beings, in the name of religion. Manifest destiny had an overly healthy dose of the divine right of Christians in it. An idea poisonous to anyone who might challenge the concept of personal gain.

As a neophyte in this field of reading, I was sickened by much of what I read here. It will take more than a single post to outline some of the more poignant inconsistencies between Christian practice and preaching perpetrated upon those who were here before us. A people forcefully converted to a religion that was openly oppressive to them reveals the dark underbelly of missionary zeal and the truth of the evils religion can hide. Or even justify. Often Dan decries the religion that believes all the answers are in a black book. What was done to his own family in the name of Christianity led to several restless nights for this reader. Kent Nerburn writes with the conviction of a man haunted by an experience of rough reconciliation. From the title, I had expected maybe werewolves or specters to roam this book, but instead what I found was much more terrifying. It was the naked lust for personal gain—a monster that no crucifix or prayer ribbon can ever banish or dispel.