Category Archives: random tidbits

The All-you-can-eat buffet, megachurch, and contemporary politics

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Ed Winstead makes the connection:

If the South, which is so central to modern Republicanism, can be defined in some sense by its food and its religion, then lines can be drawn between the buffet and the mega-church, the pig pickin’ and the tent revival, home cooking and the old-fashioned community congregation (though in the buffet it is the grease, and not the Holy Spirit, that sends you writhing to the floor). The mega-church, marketing as slick as the preacher’s hair, is a pale and commercialized approximation of a traditional church (which, whatever you think of Southern Protestantism theologically, draws a great deal from and contributes a great deal to its communities). In much the same way, a buffet fails, deliberately fails, necessarily fails, to recreate a home-cooked meal.

This is the new American Dream: the buffet, the mega-church. Both purport to embody how it should be, how it always was, that the deep-fried tomatoes and the arena-league sermonizers hearken back to better times. This is nonsense.

He argues that the buffet trivializes and commercializes Southern cuisine, that a cuisine founded on necessity and want has become the promise of never running out.

We talk in our churches about product, church-shopping, and marketing, responding to the needs of our congregations, and to that degree what he says about mega-churches may extend to most congregations. And for us Anglicans, there’s especially the appeal to nostalgia.

Worth thinking about

Perfect love casts out fear: Christianity and the American culture of violence–updated

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Another act of mass violence today. The media went wacko. Meanwhile, yesterday in Chicago, nineteen people were shot, including eight in a drive-by shooting. Roger Ebert pointed out the parallel.

A story on inner-city Philadelphia examines the effects of gun violence on the community and on individuals, focusing on the trauma caused by the level of violence:

Between January 1, 2001, and May 29th of this year, 18,043 people were shot in Philadelphia. That equates to about one shooting every six hours. In that same time period, there were 3,852 murders—a new body yielded up for disposal nearly every day. The entire length of the conflict in Afghanistan hasn’t produced as many dead Americans as we’ve picked up off our city’s streets.

As others have pointed out, media coverage of mass shootings conforms to our own fears. Random shootings seem to receive more attention than targeted ones (does this explain the relative lack of attention to the Oak Creek shootings?) We’ve become inured to certain kinds of violence–the shootings in Chicago being an excellent example, and our own ongoing participation in wars abroad. It’s only when that violence affects us, or people like us, that we seem to take notice.

There have been many attempts to make sense of the recent epidemic of shootings. Of course each shooter had his own set of fears and disappointments, his own set of demons, to make generalization dangerous.

What strikes me about our national mood is our level of fear. We are afraid of the future and afraid of the future direction of our country and world. We worry about the economy, about our jobs and families. We worry whether we will be able to make ends meet, or whether we will have adequate resources or medical care in our retirement. That fear percolates under the surface all of the time and is given voice in our degraded political culture.

One thing that unites these recent shootings is that the perpetrators are all white men. Elizabeth Drescher has pointed to the significance of this:

Whatever the unique complex of psychosocial, religious, financial, moral, political, or other issues that tormented the mass killers recently populating Twitter feeds and news headlines, they all sought to solve their problems with a particular expression of gun violence that maps easily to particular configurations of masculinity—apparently across classes and political ideologies. Those of us concerned with how religious ideologies participate in narratives of domination and violence, then, would do well to explore the masculinist roots of Christianity or other religious traditions, particularly as male authority and normativity are emphasized in more conservative expressions.

How do we as communities of faith respond the shootings as well as the underlying fears, the very notion of “redemptive violence” that permeate our culture? How can we offer hope and life in this culture of fear and death?  How can we proclaim a gospel that might work toward the transformation of our society? How can we name and combat the evil in our midst and offer life-giving alternatives?

That phrase from I John 4, “but perfect love casts out fear,” has been running through my head the past several weeks. If we can experience that sort of love in our hearts. If we can experience that sort of love in our congregations, if we can invite and express that sort of love with those we encounter in our neighborhoods and communities, we will go a long way toward overcoming our national culture of fear and violence.

A couple of reviews of books about 16th century England

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Both reviewers are prominent historians. Keith Thomas reviews The Watchers: A Secret History of the Reign of Elizabeth I by Stephen Alford. It’s a study of Elizabethan spies and intelligence efforts. He concludes:

Stephen Alford’s engrossing book reminds us that most governments will stop at very little if national security is at stake. When political conflicts are exacerbated by fanatically held religious differences, the outcome is even more deadly.

The other review is by Diarmaid MacCulloch of Eamon Duffy’s Saints, Sacrilege and Sedition. It’s a collection of essays by the author of Stripping of the Altars and The Voices of Morebath (both of which I assigned in my classes over the years). MacCulloch is critical of Duffy for overemphasizing popular resistance to Reform and argues in the review that by the mid-Tudor period, the lines between Catholic and Protestant were fairly clearly drawn, that Duffy tends to overemphasize Catholic sentiment, and occasionally simply misreads the evidence. Most interesting, MacCulloch ends with an anecdote new to me that reveals the complexity of religion in sixteenth-century England:

In 1566, Elizabeth I’s archbishop of Canterbury, Matthew Parker, was disconcerted to receive a bill from the bailiffs of the city of Oxford. They were still owed £43 out of the £63 that was their expenditure for guarding and burning Hugh Latimer, Nicholas Ridley and Thomas Cranmer, back in Mary’s reign. Mary’s government added meanness to its brutality, and had not paid up. “The case is miserable, the debt is just,” the Puritan president of Magdalen College wrote in perplexity to the archbishop. So Parker, feeling that it was only fair, had a whip-round among his fellow Protestant bishops to pay for the expenses of burning England’s most famous Protestant martyrs. I wonder if any counter-reformation bishops would have reimbursed damnable heretics, had they presented that sort of bill.

Rick Bragg on the Southern Obsession with College Football

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A must read, for Southerners and Northerners alike. It’s a religion, too:

WE BELIEVE SOME things, down here. Some of them, I have lived long enough to question. We believe that if a snapping turtle bites you, it will not turn loose until it hears thunder, but since I have seen a snapping turtle as big as a turkey roaster bite a broomstick in two, I believe it will turn loose any time it damn well wants. We believe snakes have mystical powers and will charm you if you look into their eyes. When I retire, I plan to test that theory on water moccasins at my stock pond, and if they have not charmed me in four or five seconds, I will shoot them. Then, in times of drought, I will hang them in a tree. That, we believe, will make it rain. My grandmother, God rest her soul, told me so, so it must be true.

And we believe — well, maybe all but the Unitarians — that God himself favors our football teams. On Friday nights and Saturday afternoons, our coaches, some of them blasphemers and backsliders and not exactly praying men the other six days of the week, tell their players to hit a knee and ask his favor at the same exact instant the other team is also asking his favor, which I have always taken to mean that God, all things being equal, favors the team with the surest holder on long field goals.

h/t Alan Jacobs

Living with Homophobia

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Jesse Bering, whose essay against Chik-Fil-A president Dan Cathy was especially venomous, has this to say in his defense (and directed to progressive Christians):

Such old, unaddressed wounds, I gather now, never healed properly. Those 1980’s-era memories, along with several more decades of simmering in a toxic religious nation that has viewed me consistently and without apology as wilfully rejecting God by “choosing” not to be attracted to the opposite sex, is the backstory to my “angry rant.” From the time I was nine years old, I have felt, to my very bones, a palpable climate of Christian scorn, loathed not because of what I’ve done, but because of what I unalterably am. If this is not the Christ-like version of Christianity that you adhere to, I believe you, but know that your gentler version has lost the public relations campaign to that of your demonizing evangelical brethren, whose message of intolerance continues to be received much more clearly by the majority of gay youth.

Read it all here. His earlier piece is here.

We’ll be doing a little piece of PR for a “kinder, gentler” Christianity on Sunday on Capitol Square.

F. Scott Fitzgerald gets religion

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The New Yorker published a Fitzgerald short story that it rejected back in 1936. In it, the BVM lights a cigarette for a corset and girdle saleswoman.

It had been a long time since she had prayed. She scarcely knew what to pray for, so she prayed for her employer, and for the clients in Des Moines and Kansas City. When she had finished praying, she knelt up. An image of the Madonna gazed down upon her from a niche, six feet above her head.

Vaguely she regarded it. Then she got up from her knees and sank back wearily in the corner of the pew. In her imagination, the Virgin came down, like in the play “The Miracle,” and took her place and sold corsets and girdles for her and was tired, just as she was. Then for a few minutes Mrs. Hanson must have slept.

No Patience for Mystery

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Ta-Nehisi Coates explains Jonah Lehrer as a symptom of what’s wrong with our culture:

But we now live in a world where counter-intuitive bullshitting is valorized, where the pose of argument is more important than the actual pursuit of truth, where clever answers take precedence over profound questions. We have no patience for mystery. We want the deciphering of gods. We want oracles. And we want them right now.

(h/t Media Matters for America)

On secularism, establishment, and the Olympic opening ceremonies

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I didn’t watch them. I was at the theater with friends but my twitter feed was full of comments from Americans and Brits about what they saw and didn’t see. One of the most poignant moments of the entire ceremony was the ballet set to “Abide With Me” in memory of “those who are not here.” NBC cut to an interview with Michael Phelps.

I wondered what that says about the US and Great Britain, about how an established church, even if relatively unimportant, helps to shape the self-understanding of a people. In addition to the “Abide With Me” sequence, the opening ceremonies began with Blake’s “Jerusalem.” The Dean of Durham comments:

Instead, Boyle was true to Blake’s text, which is his Christian vision of a just and caring society. But it has to be formed and helped to flourish with the native gifts and characteristics that make us what we are.  This nuanced awareness is, I think, an aspect of the spirituality of our islands that we cherish.  It’s embedded in the way we do liturgy and theology. In its eloquence and simplicity, that moment carried great power.

Of “Abide with me” he writes:

The other moment where faith broke through was in the invitation to remember ‘those who are not here’.  After the spectacle and the celebration, what heralded the arrival of the athletes was not a grand rhetorical climax but the silencing of the crowd, an act of recollection, the words of a prayer.  For yes, unbelievably, we had all of ‘Abide with me’ sung quietly while a simple ballet on the theme of being lost and found was performed on the stage.  It was a clever choice because of its Cup Final resonances; and yet once again, it was subverted in a way that restored meaning to a great hymn and personalised it.  ‘Hold thou thy cross before my closing eyes / Shine through the gloom and point me to the skies’: who would have thought we would hear such words charged with Christian hope and expectation at an Olympic opening ceremony?  For me it was among the most moving aspects of the whole event.

I doubt anything of the sort could be produced in the US. We lack a lingua france of liturgy and theology. It’s not just that there would be protests from the separation of church and state people. There would also be conflict over who would get to shape and define whatever religious expression was being made. And the secularists who are completely tone-deaf about religion would probably cut to an interview with Michael Phelps.

He concludes:

There is more to ‘spirituality’ than when it surfaces and becomes explicit.  It has an intuitive side that doesn’t get expressed in words but is still alive in most people’s experience of life.  Perhaps in the joy and exuberance of last night, something more about life and about God was hinted at.  Perhaps some may have experienced it as a kind of liturgy.  Perhaps, even, the sight of thousands of people of every age, background and ethnicity throwing themselves into this genuinely democratic celebration offered a glimpse of Jerusalem and of the kingdom of heaven itself.

Read it all here.

The “Abide with me” sequence is available here.

Whatever the meaning of this for the British, it seems to me to make clear the barrenness of religion’s role in American culture.

 

A defense of Enlightenment Religion–and a plea for its recovery in the present

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The Enlightenment comes in for a good bit of criticism these days from religious circles, both left and right, from fundamentalists and postmodernists. Susan Nieman mounts a robust defense of Enlightenment religion:

The Enlightenment denied piety to make room for reverence. If piety is a matter of fear and trembling, reverence is a matter of awe and wonder. There is very little written on the concept of reverence, and no wonder: reverence itself is virtually ineffable. It’s what gives rise to the feeling expressed by Wittgenstein: “Whereof one cannot speak, thereof one must be silent.” Reverence is what you feel when you feel overpowered, struck dumb by the realization that some things are beyond human grasp. Why should human language be able to contain it?

And:

I’ve been arguing for a worldview in which reason and reverence are not at odds but in tandem. They work together like Kant’s moral law and starry heavens – in order to be decent, we must keep one eye on each. In order to be decent: not because religion is the foundation of morality, though it can be a way of expressing it, but because reverence involves gratitude for Creation and awareness of our dependence on it.

There are obvious reasons why we need reverence for Creation. One of the few hopeful things coming out of red state – that is, Republican-leaning – America is a movement of alliances between environmentalist groups and those Christian churches that regard human beings as nature’s stewards. I could list some other things that reverence would be good for, but the very making of such a list would be paradoxical and self-defeating. Reverence cannot be defended on instrumental grounds. Even though it’s good for us, that can’t be the reason to feel it.

It’s long, but deserves a careful read.