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July 27, 2007
Younger Evangelicals Changing Their Minds about the Christian Right
Posted by Jesus Politics
The evidence is mounting that a growing percentage of younger evangelicals are beginning to distance themselves from the political agenda of the Christian Right. A recent Religion News Service article captures well this shift:
According to the Pew Research Center survey in February, support for Democratic candidates jumped from 16 percent to 26 percent among white evangelicals under 30 between the 2004 and 2006 elections.
"Many people have become disillusioned by President Bush, but younger evangelicals have gone from being very enthusiastic supporters of the president to being markedly less so and their party IDs have also switched," said John Green, senior fellow at the Pew Forum on Religion & Public Life. [ ]
The DNC is also working with the College Democrats of America's faith caucus on outreach.
"We are broadening the discussion," said Melissa Roberts, a junior at Jesuit-run Boston College and chair of the College Democrats faith caucus. "People are realizing we can define our political beliefs by more than two issues. We can reach beyond abortion and gay marriage."
Emily Holmes, a senior at Bethel University, an evangelical school in Arden Hills, Minn., said a desire to expand the political discussion led her to form the evangelical school's first College Democrats club three years ago. Since then, she said, she has observed a change in
her classmates' political interest.
"Within the past three years, I've noticed a subtle change in our campus dynamics," Holmes said. "We are a Christian school and social justice tends to be the core of a lot of what we care about. It's just the way we want to go about taking care of it is what really separates the political parties."
At Calvin College, a moderate evangelical school in the Republican stronghold of Grand Rapids, Mich., there is no student Democratic organization,but several clubs have been formed to address issues traditionally associated with the left.
Posted by Jesus Politics at 07:01 PM | Comments (0)
July 20, 2007
Proud of Iraq War? Atheist Christopher Hitchens Is; God Book Misses the Mark, Too
Posted by Faithful Progressive
Atheists have a problem, the leaders of their New Atheism movement (with the exception of evolutionary biologist Richard Dawkins, who is just dull and intellectually dishonest) are themselves morally repugnant people. Christopher Hitchens, their current poster boy, supported all of the lies and distortions which led us into the disastrous war in Iraq. He still finds it A War to Be Proud Of! He even rationalizes the moral and strategic tragedy of Abu Ghraib: "Prison conditions at Abu Ghraib have improved markedly and dramatically since the arrival of Coalition troops in Baghdad."
This insanity doesn't compare to me, somehow, on the moral scale with all of the religious folks,from all faiths most recently half a million liberal Catholics, who have opposed the War in Iraq. But how is this relevant to Hitchens' new book God is Not Great: How Religion Poisons Everything? He makes similarly repugnant arguments there--including willing away the historical challenge to the moral superiority of atheists presented by mass murderers Pol Pot and Stalin--as this excellent review by associate Atlantic Monthly editor Ross Douthat points out.
From the Summer 2007 issue of the Claremont Review of Books: Lord Have Mercy; A review of God is Not Great: How Religion Poisons Everything, by Christopher Hitchens
By Ross Douthat
Posted July 9, 2007
...The book has been written with two main purposes in mind: to show that all religions are false, and to prove that their effects are near-universally pernicious. In each case, Hitchens's argument proceeds principally by anecdote, and at his best he is as convincing as that particular style allows, which is to say not terribly. He succeeds in demonstrating that many faiths are frauds and many prophets have been fakers, that believers commit all sorts of terrible crimes and that Buddhists are no more pacific than Southern Baptists, and that the Bible is neither a work of academic history nor a biology textbook. Then again, I was convinced of these points already, and hoped that Hitchens would pick a fight on more contested territory, such as the origin and nature of spiritual experience, which seems a more likely source for man's persistent religiosity than, say, the fear of thunderstorms or the stubborn refusal to crack open The Origin of Species. But like most apologists for atheism, he evinces little interest in the topic of religion as it is actually lived, preferring to stick to the safer ground of putting the godly in the dock and cataloguing their crimes against humanity. (snip)
It might be argued that the brevity of the book and the amount of ground it covers should excuse the less-than-rigorous fashion in which it advances its more controversial arguments. But the demands of brevity should clarify and hone, whereas Hitchens manages to be both short and sloppy. To dispense with both the Old and New Testament in 25 pages is a difficult task, but if he was limited by considerations of length he might have found better evidence for the fraudulence of the Christian witness than, say, the less-than-earthshattering revelation that non-canonical gospels circulated in the centuries after Christ; or the news that the well-known passage in the Gospel of John dealing with the woman taken in adultery was not part of the original Johannine text; or the self-evidently specious observation that the New Testament authors "cannot agree on anything of importance." Hitchens might also have better disguised the fact that he seems to have consulted no New Testament authorities more distinguished than the latest publications from Elaine Pagels, the doyenne of the "lost gospels" industry, and Bart Ehrman, the ex-fundamentalist who abandoned Christianity once it became clear to him that there might have been actual human beings involved in the composition of its sacred texts. (snip)
Every book has its errors, of course, but few are quite so tendentious in their interpretation of the facts they manage to get right. Like an overzealous Christian searching pagan texts for anything that could be construed as foreshadowing Christ's coming, Hitchens scours the record of man's inhumanities to man for any hint that they might have been motivated by piety, prophecy, or dogma. No atrocity has been committed and no tyranny established, if you believe his theocentric history of violence, that did not have religion at its root somehow.
This would seem a rather difficult case to make, since a cursory reading of history suggests that loyalty to one's kin, one's tribe, and one's nation—not to mention sundry political ideologies—has sparked at least as much violence as any theological controversy. But fortunately for Hitchens's polemic, religion is so woven into human affairs that nearly every war contains some religious element for his monomania to batten on. And perhaps some readers will even be persuaded by, for instance, his peculiar suggestion that the Hutu-on-Tutsi carnage in Rwanda had less to do with ethnic grievances and the pernicious legacy of Victorian Europe's racial theories than with some minor Marian visionaries, whose prophecies, which included dire and all-too-accurate predictions of imminent mass murder, were briefly co-opted by Hutu thugs.
More likely, though, the reader will come away unpersuaded of anything save the self-evident truth of the matter, which is that human beings, being a clannish and quarrelsome lot, tend to find all sorts of things to fight over, and that nearly every aspect of human affairs can serve as a powerful spur to actions both heroic and deplorable. So religion produces both Torquemada and Dorothy Day; philosophy spurs Socrates to die for truth and Heidegger to prostitute himself for Hitler; science cures polio and speeds our missiles on their way; the bonds of family provide the foundation for innumerable happy childhoods, but also for the Wars of the Roses. None of this is to excuse the crimes of religious believers; it's merely to suggest that the line between good and evil runs through every aspect of human affairs, and denouncing belief in God for poisoning the world is as absurd as denouncing "democracy" because it has empowered tyrants from Hitler down to Hugo Chavez, or "equality" because its partisans have included the Jacobins, the Khmer Rouge, and the KGB.
Of this last objection, at least, Hitchens seems well aware, and he devotes an entire chapter to arguing strenuously that both the Nazis and the Communists were effectively religious and effectively theocratic, their secular experiments poisoned by religion. But with this move he begins sawing off the very branch he occupies, since if faith tends to infect even secular politics, then what separates Hitchens from his religious enemies? (Continues)
FP: If this is the best the New Atheists can produce--the highly intolerant Sam Harris, and the repulsive Mr. Hitchens--then this new movement is in trouble indeed. When the New Atheists announce that a half million of them have come together to oppose this War, or poverty, or something other than freedom of conscience, I'll start looking up them as role models. Until then, or until they get more honest and attractive leaders, not so much
Posted by Faithful Progressive at 10:58 PM | Comments (6)
July 19, 2007
Barack Obama and W. E. B. Du Bois
Posted by Jesus Politics
Edward Blum, author of the recently published "W. E. B. Du Bois, American Prophet", offers some interesting ideas about what Barack Obama could learn from Du Bois. Here is how Blum begins his article:
Barack Obama and W. E. B. Du Bois have a lot in common. Both had absent fathers whom they likened to dreamers; both relied on their mothers; both earned advanced degrees from Harvard University; both traveled extensively throughout the world; both ran for United States Senate (Du Bois lost his bid as a labor candidate from New York in 1950); both elicited questions of racial authenticity, of whether they could represent African Americans since they had mixed-ancestries and were highly educated; and both shared a desire to wrestle religious ideas and language away from conservatives. Perhaps, as Barack Obama and more broadly the Democratic Party attempt to engage religious issues, it will behoove them not only to look back to what Du Bois had to say about faith, but also to create a pantheon of spiritual liberals to revere as part of the quest to demonstrate historical and religious legitimacy.
Posted by Jesus Politics at 08:59 PM | Comments (0)
Samuel Beckett on Jesus and Laughter
Posted by Faithful Progressive
Faith and Theology c/o connexions
Did Jesus laugh? The fictitious dispute in Umberto Eco’s novel The Name of the Rose “is more than fiction. It reflects a line of tradition which really existed, from John Chrysostom through Augustine to Bernard of Clairvaux and Hugo of St Victor, of the Christian denunciation of laughter” (Karl-Josef Kuschel). Nor is such a “theology of tears” limited to the world-denying, death-obsessed zeitgeist of the Middle Ages. John Wesley once disciplined a preacher on the charges (in ascending order?) of heresy, adultery – and the man’s proneness to “break a jest, and laugh at it heartily.” Here, from Beckett’s Molloy, Moran debates the issue with Father Ambrose, who sides with Eco’s Jorge (a Dominican – who is blind):
“What a joy it is to laugh, from time to time, he said. Is it not? I said. It is peculiar to man, he said. So I have noticed, I said. A brief silence ensued. […] Animals never laugh, he said. It takes us to find that funny, I said. What? he said. It takes us to find that funny, I said loudly. He mused. Christ never laughed either, he said, so far as we know. He looked at me. Can you wonder? I said.”
You laughed, right? Christ, I reckon, would have cracked up too! Did he not have a Beckett-like sense of the absurd (gnats and camels, logs and splinters), the ironic (calling Simon a Πετρος, telling fishermen where to fish), and even the coarse (suggesting that one go starkers in court [Matthew 5:40], insinuating that the Pharisees are full of crap [Mark 7:15]). And is anyone going to tell me that a man who likes to party, with a reputation to go with it, doesn’t like a laugh? So with many a Renaissance Humanist, Eco’s William of Baskerville (a Franciscan, one of God’s “merry men” – who can see because he wears spectacles) was surely right: of course Jesus laughed!
Posted by Faithful Progressive at 03:36 PM | Comments (0)
July 12, 2007
More Wayward Christian Soldiers
Posted by Jesus Politics
In an essay adapted from "Wayward Christian Soldiers: Freeing the Gospel from Political Captivity", Charles Marsh writes:
In their enthusiastic support of the White House's decision to invade Iraq, evangelicals in the United States practiced an ecumenical isolationism that mirrored the prevailing political trend. Rush Limbaugh may have pleased his "dittoheads" in mocking the dissenting pastors, archbishops, bishops, and church leaders who stuck their noses into our nation's foreign policy, but the people in the United States who call themselves Christian must organize their priorities and values on a different standard than partisan loyalty. [ ]
These past six years have been transformative in the religious history of the United States. It is arguably the passing of the evangelical moment -- if not the end of evangelicalism's cultural and political relevance, then certainly the loss of its theological credibility. Conservative evangelical elites, in exchange for political access and power, have ransacked the faith and trivialized its convictions. [ ]
With many other Christians in the United States and many more abroad, I have watched with horror in recent years as the name of Jesus has been used to serve national ambitions and justify war. Forgetting the difference between discipleship and partisanship, and with complete indifference to the wisdom and insights of the Christian tradition, we have recast the faith according to our cultural preferences and baptized our prejudices, along with our will-to-power, in the shallow waters of civic piety. [ ]
Like Bonhoeffer, I fear that the gospel has been humiliated in our time. But if this has happened, it is not because the message -- the good news that God loves us unconditionally in Jesus Christ, that we are freed and forgiven in God's amazing grace -- has changed. Nor is it due to the machinations of secularists, or because the post-Enlightenment world has dispensed with the hypothesis of God. The Christian faith has not only endured modernity and post-modernity, but flourished in its new settings.
The gospel has been humiliated because too many American Christians have decided that there are more important things to talk about. We would rather talk about our country, our values, our troops, and our way of life; and although we might think we are paying tribute to God when we speak of these other things, we are only flattering ourselves. [ ]
Franklin Graham, the evangelist (and son of Billy Graham), boasted that the American invasion of Iraq opens up exciting new opportunities for missions to non-Christian Arabs. This is not what the Hebrew or Christian prophets meant by righteousness and discipleship. In fact, the grotesque notion that preemptive war and the destruction of innocent life pave the way for the preaching of the Christian message strikes me as a mockery and a betrayal.
But if Franklin Graham speaks truthfully of the Christian faith and its mission in the world -- as many evangelicals seem to believe -- then we should have none of it. Rather, we should join the ranks of righteous unbelievers and big-hearted humanists who rage against cruelty and oppression with the intensity of people who live fully in this world. I am certain that it would be better for Christians to stand in solidarity with compassionate atheists and agnostics, firmly resolved against injustice and cruelty, than to sing "Amazing Grace" with the heroic masses who cannot tell the difference between the cross and the flag.
Posted by Jesus Politics at 07:58 AM | Comments (0)
July 06, 2007
Wayward Christian Soldiers
Posted by Jesus Politics
"Wayward Christian Soldiers: Freeing the Gospel from Political Captivity" is the title of a new book written by Charles Marsh, a University of Virginia professor of religious studies.
For a taste of the book, below are some excerpts from an article announcing its publication:
The author shows that the most prominent voices in American evangelicalism have arrogantly redefined Christianity on the basis of partisan politics rather than scripture and tradition. The role of politics in distorting the Christian message can be seen most dramatically in the invasion of Iraq, he argues: Some 87% of American evangelicals supported going to war, while every single evangelical church outside the United States opposed it.
“With many other Christians in the United States and many more abroad,” says Marsh, “I have watched in horror as the name of Jesus has been used to serve national ambitions, strengthen middle-class values and justify war. ...We have recast the faith according to our cultural preferences and baptized our prejudices, along with our will to power, in the shallow waters of civic piety.”
Marsh argues that the Christian Right must move away from the divisiveness and fervor of the political arena and return to bearing quiet witness to the Gospel in the practices of hospitality, peacemaking and contemplative prayer. "Wayward Christian Soldiers" is a meditation on keeping the mysteries of the faith from political misuse while offering ideas on how to be a Christian after George W. Bush. Offering an authentic Christian alternative to the narcissistic piety of popular evangelicalism, "Wayward Christian Soldiers" represents a unique entry into the increasingly pivotal debate over the role of faith in American politics.
Posted by Jesus Politics at 06:04 AM | Comments (5)
