On Hell...

My appreciation for and hatred of Chuck Klosterman continues apace. But I’m making my peace with it, so I’ve got that going for me. I’m reading Sex, Drugs, and Cocoa Puffs right now and, much like Killing Yourself to Live, it makes me want to write long, pretentious, self-aware essays. Of course I did that before I ever read any of Klosterman’s work. I’m just aware of it now. So I guess it’s kind of postmodern… I feel like starting this post thusly: I should really be sleeping, but instead I’m writing. I’ve moved from my couch to my bed, which sleep experts tell me is a terrible idea. So I’m sitting on the left side. It’s a queen-size and it’s never occupied by more than me, but still I sleep on the right side only, as if I’m waiting for the occupant of the left to come home from a weekend out of town. Right now I’m not technically writing in my bed. I’m writing in someone else’s bed. I just don’t know who that is. But I won’t start it that way. That’d be self-aware, pseudo-hip, pretentious, and not particularly good writing…* Anyway… Over the course of the weekend I met two girls. One of them has a boyfriend with whom I share a name. The other one may or may not have been single. I find them both fascinating at the moment and, to be perfectly honest, some tiny little part of my brain hopes that I never see either one again, never get to know anything else about them. It’s weird, I suppose. I mean, it’s not like I have anything against either one of them, nor would I expect to. But lack of information can be far, far better than actual information. Sometimes the mystery makes people more interesting than they actually are. Sometimes it simply makes the universe more interesting than it actually is. There seems to be a critical mass of information on any given subject. When you hit that critical mass you have to reject the object of which you have just learned or you have to accept it for what it is. Either way you have to learn to move on with your life. We hit that critical mass with people. It’s most obvious in romantic relationships. I’ve decided in the past that I was in love with someone, that my life would be forfeit without that person in it. I like to believe that I’ve been that person for at least one person in my life. But here I am, sitting on the left side of my bed because there’s no one to occupy it instead. There isn’t even a lamp over here, or a second night stand. It’s just empty space. I’m okay with that. So far anybody I’ve met who I thought would occupy this half has ended up reaching that critical mass of knowledge with me or I with her and we’ve gone our separate ways. It might have taken longer for one side or the other, because it always does, but it’s been okay in the end. That’s how the world works. One of the things that I have a hard time understanding is how I can explain to people why I’m no longer a Christian. It seems a lot of people assume there was a specific moment where I said, “Nope, can’t do it anymore.” Most of the people I went to or would have probably gone to church with seem content to assume that there was a single moment wherein I got really really really really hurt and mad at god and just walked away. Non-Christians, at least of the sort who were never really committed to the whole church thing, don’t necessarily seem to think that, but there’s still a weird undercurrent where they seem to think one day I had an (anti-)epiphany and, hey, no more religion. The truth is that there simply wasn’t a point where it all changed. I hit that point of critical mass and it became inevitable I’d leave, but it was far from instantaneous. I went through life gathering information and experiences and one day the neat little puzzle Christianity had so kindly put together for me didn’t fit together any more. One of those places of extreme difficulty was the entire concept of Hell. Slacktivist really describes the main issue best, so I’ll just summarize. Basically, hell comes up all of three times in the Bible. By which I mean the Christian Bible. There are a couple references to Sheol in the Jewish Bible, but out of all of those passages about all that other stuff the eternal punishment thing barely comes in to play. Yet the Christianity with which I grew up made its entire theology about avoiding hell and trying to convince everyone in the pews to try to convince everyone they knew to avoid it, too. It never really added up, especially when you actually approach the Bible and see what it has to say about avoiding the place. And that message is far different from any message I got from the pulpit on Sunday mornings. See, the conventional Christian message is that you have to pray “The Sinner’s Prayer” and “accept Jesus in to your heart.” The more I read the Bible, though, the more I realized that no one ever said “The Sinner’s Prayer.” I started to wonder if anybody who got preached to in the Book of Acts actually managed to make it to heaven. Then I thought about the societal Christianity in the Medieval period and realized that the vast majority of the people there would have called themselves Christians and never made it in to heaven according to the system in place at my church. Then I started paying attention to what Jesus actually said about who goes where. Matthew 25:33-36 says, “Then he will say to those on his left, ‘Depart from me, you who are cursed, into the eternal fire prepared for the devil and his angels. For I was hungry and you gave me nothing to eat, I was thirsty and you gave me nothing to drink, I was a stranger and you did not invite me in, I needed clothes and you did not clothe me, I was sick and in prison and you did not look after me.’” Jesus never said, “You didn’t pray the Sinner’s Prayer.” He said, “You didn’t help the people who needed it.” Yet this is the source (I’d assume) of the works v. faith argument. Honestly, too, I think it was a license to be lazy. See, if all you have to do is pray a prayer and you’re good, you never have to be uncomfortable. You never have to put yourself out and try to change the world. You can just, as people I knew did, sit back and wait for the Second Coming. Thing is, though, I don’t think the vast majority of Christians actually believe in hell. Well, they don’t believe in hell as a punishment for the unbelievers. Honestly, I think hell is just a thing that gets thrown out to keep the faithful in line. I was constantly worried that I was going to do something so horrible that it would get me sent to hell. Well, maybe not constantly, but it came up on a regular basis. I regularly got, “You’re not good enough because of [this], [this], and [that] and god’s pissed,” messages. I don’t claim that my anecdotes count as data, but it sure seems that more time was spent trying to rile up the faithful to keep them acting properly than actually getting them to go do some outreach. Eventually I realized it was all bullshit. It seemed that Paul was the one who tried to bring in the weird concept of holding to a specific belief. But then James said that true religion was to look after widows and orphans in their distress. Meanwhile, Jesus divided the sheep and the goats according to which ones helped the poor and, in general, had compassion. The Bible doesn’t present the pat explanations of how to get saved that the churches I used to attend would have us believe. I think that for most people in the pews those oversimplified and inhuman answers were profoundly uncomfortable, too. It seems far more likely that if there is a Jesus and he judges the quick and the dead he’d be far more interested in how you respond to John Scalzi’s essay on Being Poor than how you respond to the Bridge Diagram. If that’s the case, I actually have very few problems with Jesus and religion in general. Of course that was only one aspect of my reaction to the critical mass of questions. I suppose it’s probably about time to get to a couple posts I promised a long, long time ago… -------------------------------- *I hate myself for everything I did here.

This is a Culture of Destruction

I like your medicine I like your birds and your bees Now don't you start thinkin' That you gotta buy the cure from them, sugar I know you know They're only gonna sell you the disease --RCPM, "I Know You Know" I spent the first twenty-five years or so of my life as a soldier in the middle of a war. No, seriously. You might think you've never heard of it, but there are books about my war all over the place and echoes of it nestled within the far-flung bits of literature you encounter on a daily basis. It's on the nightly news, buried in Reuters feeds, and on the pages of your newspapers. And lest you think that your average toddler can't fight a war, well the enemy didn't fight fair. The enemy attacked me, left me wounded, crippled, handicapped in a truly gruesome fight long before I figured out where the battlefield was or had the ability to reach it under my own power. And the weapon my enemy used to attack me in my most vulnerable state might surprise you. It was my father. That's what fathers do. My dad, in fact, was an alcoholic clown who beat me with his oversized shoes. All kidding aside, for a brief period one of my favorite books was John Eldredge's Wild at Heart, a guide of sorts to Biblical manhood. Or, at least, a variety of Biblical manhood that is seriously in vogue right now. And it's one that's probably extremely dangerous (as Matt Taibbi discovered in the Rolling Stone article linked above). I raised a tempest in a teacup over at Slacktivist and Right Behind over the last week. I wrote a couple of stories, basically on a dare, using characters from Left Behind. I don't consider myself a fanfic writer and I sure as hell don't think of myself as a slashfic writer, but it was an intersting idea to tackle and a chance to write on a subject I generally avoid (due, mostly, to knowing pretty much nothing about being a sexually active lesbian. Also, writing explicitly about sex is usually guaranteed to fail, since after a while I think all such writing devolves to a point where it reads like a manuscript written by a 15 year-old virgin. Oh, and just in case anybody wants to know, I don't even watch porn. It started as a religious injunction, but now is pretty much because I think it's massively stupid. Kind of like when I was younger and didn't watch scary movies because I thought I'd be, you know, scared. Now I don't because most of them are really friggin' stupid). The tempest was raised by one of the other regulars, who kept calling B.S. on me because I wrote the characters with daddy issues. This got a bunch of us started on the massive daddy issue industry that is modern evangelical Christianity. Now, then, fanfic itself is a wasted endeavor in my book. If I'm going to work with a character, I want it to be my own. In the case of Left Behind, though, it's an interesting exercise, since the characters read like the authors have never actually met a real human being, which is no mean feat. Normal, healthy, reasonable people do not act in the manner of the strange simulacra of people found in Left Behind and in my attempts to attach real motivations to the characters I unwittingly dredged up my fictional father issues. Fundagelical Christianity has written itself in to a corner. There's really no other way to say it. Guys like Eldredge are trying to write Christianity out of that corner and when I look at it from this side of the equation I begin to realize that they're doing a great deal of collateral damage. Most people go through a phase where they think that their parents are the dumbest fuck-ups in the world. It's usually called the teenage years. This, I believe, is a symptom of the twin vanities of adolescence and young adulthood. First, your average teenager thinks that they're the smartest person in the world. Second, your average teenager still sees the world in fairly black and white terms due to the wild, unchecked emotional development and non-worldliness that is the hallmark of modern youth. Now, unless the parent was an actual fuck-up or abusive, the teenager will probably grow up and learn that the world is not, in fact, black and white and that he or she did not, in fact, have all the answers. At some point in all of that the realization will come that, holy crap, my parent is a person just like I am and now that I'm an adult I realize that I was, in fact, the fuck-up. This is called growing up. It's why at some point pretty much every kid does something and realizes, "I'm turning in to my mother/father." It's why whenever adults talk about teenagers the conversation is punctuated with rolled eyes and shaking heads. Fundagelical Christianity, however, clings desperately to the black and white world of the self-righteous teenager. The Biblical injunction to enter the presence of the Christ with "faith like a child" is taken as a commandment to remain childish. When the real world with all its moral ambiguities encroaches on the black and white extremes of the adolescent world, fundagelical Christianity has no effective coping mechanism. When the wild dreams of the sheltered kid are shattered by the depressing realities of layoffs and infidelity and champagne tastes on a Keystone Light budget, there's no one to turn to, no one to blame, no inbuilt coping mechanism. See, god made all of these wonderful promises to the Chosen People. If bad things happen it can't be god's fault. It has to be someone else's and that leaves either the Devil or the self. But if in the moment of the acceptance of Jesus Christ as your personal lord and savior you're given power over the princes and principalities of darkness, then something truly wrong has happened. Your weakness and failure must be the result of something residual from the before time, the time when the Devil reached you and made you a horrible, sinful person. Enter the Father Wound. Why no Mother Wound, you ask? I'm glad you brought that up. A vague Mother Wound is tacked on occasionally, in much the way that Freud added in the Elektra complex to counterbalance the Oedipal urge. But, ultimately, the man is in charge, so all failure is laid at the feet of the father. If the father does something bad, it's his fault. If the mother does something bad and the father isn't there to intervene, it's his fault. So it's all really the Father Wound. Neat, huh? The only solution to this universal disaster of the Father Wound is the Heavenly Father. You're supposed to let god be your daddy, claim your Biblical manhood or womanhood. Note that this isn't at all the same thing as growing up and claiming adulthood and it allows a perpetual adolescence and the eternal continuation of a perpetually navel gazing, childish faith upon which the rest of the world looks while rolling its eyes and sighing. The scary thing is, I'm not at all sure that anybody is really doing this with malice aforethought. I actually wonder if many, or any, of the practitioners of this psychological voodoo realize what they are doing. See, there's this strangely circular logic to this type of Christianity that it shares with any sort of system of thought built entirely on single-point solutions. If the only tool in the toolbox is a hammer, the handyman will tend to see nails (thanks to JayH for the image). In seeing that they're going to be fixed by a hammer no matter what, eventually the screws and staples will try to be nails. The analogy kind of breaks down here, but those nail-ified screws, if given a hammer and told to fix the table, will try to turn everything else in to nails eventually, too. This is the point of synthesis, at least for me. Because, you see, it was in the pages of John Eldredge's Wild at Heart where I first encountered the Golden-Haired Woman, a concept Eldredge borrowed from Robert Bly and Bly, in turn, borrowed from somewhere else (the Brothers Grimm, I believe). When a certain member of the female gender about whom I've spilled no small amount of digital ink first brought me to the place where I realized that I should give storytelling a try, my first two teachers were Joseph Campbell and my tattered memories of Wild at Heart. Campbell tried to take all of the world of myth and synthesize it in to a single narrative. Eldredge tried to take a single narrative and make the world of myth fit underneath its umbrella. Synthesis and exegesis. Campbell tried to fit everything under Freud's psychoanalytic concepts. Eldredge created this almost Freudian concept of the Father Wound going back to the very depths of childhood that needed to be worked through. Bly, meanwhile, tried to create a neo-manhood based in myth and storytelling. The overstory, the single myth we all constantly and subconsciously narrate in our own heads. Fiat Lex unwittingly provided the key for me to unlock this entire thought process earlier today. I believe that there is a universal story. Without a universal story, a shared experience, I don't think that the human race could interact. The necessary social grooming to maintain trade, to avoid or conclude war, to hopefully eventually combine forces to leave the cradle and find our place in the universe all rely on a shared experience. But the universal story doesn't create us, it comes from us. That is the key distinction between Campbell and Eldredge. But even Campbell's interpretation of the universal story falls short. The assumption of the universal story is in the case of Eldredge necessarily static. It is no more dynamic in Campbell, either, but because he seems to discount evolution and draws a circle with origin and terminus on a single point. It's where Bly is necessarily flawed, too. He creates a synthesized image of a new man, but bases the new man on the stories we've always told each other. We fall in love with the past too easily. We assume that the way things were is the way they will be, the way they should be. We know what the past is. It's understandable. But I've spent a decade dividing the female gender in to Golden-Haired Women and Gomers and I'm no closer to happiness now than I was my junior year of high school. I spent two years trying to convince a girl who didn't, who couldn't, to love me and accept me for who I was when I was incapable of doing so myself. I then spent seven months alternating between wondering what I could do to bring her back and trying to figure out how some other girl I'd meet along the way stacked up to her. Whose fault is that? Is it god's, her's, my father's? No, no, and emphatically no. It's my fault. And it's my responsibility to change it if I ever want to grow up. Does that admission, does that taking of responsibility instill manhood? I honestly don't know. I suspect that Eldredge would say, "No," because I haven't turned to god. I suspect Bly would say, "No," because I haven't engaged in a mythic act of initiation. Campbell might say, "Yes," but I think that this is kind of outside his scope. It doesn't matter, though. Whatever they say, I'm not listening. I'm not interested in manhood. I'm interested in adulthood. I'm tired of their stories. It's time for me to write my own.

This is My Truth, Tell Me Yours, Part 6

I'm gonna get me some peace some day Guess I missed the boat when the cradle started rockin' From the womb come a newborn baby Is the light of day any better than that? Tell me I'm not alone. I'm too tired for sleepin' Fast asleep but I'm not dreamin' I look for truth in aberration Sinned too much to be forgiven --Dead Hot Workshop, "A" There was a man of the Levant some three thousand years ago that you might have heard of. He had an entire book of the Bible written about his marriage. See, one day Yahweh decided that he needed to remind the Israelites about something. Most of the time when Yahweh did this he sent the Philistines, or the Hittittes, or famine, or plague across the land. The Israelites, you see, were the Chosen People, but they had wandering eyes. Yahweh decided that there was need for a different tack. He called a man called Hosea and told Hosea to marry a woman named Gomer. Gomer was a prostitute. Respectable Jewish prophets did not marry prostitutes. It wasn't kosher. But Hosea did it. Over time Hosea came to love Gomer. Than one day she got a little restless and went back to her whoring ways. Hosea, it seems, was relieved. Then Yahweh said to go get her back. By this time Gomer had popped out a couple of kids and was, shall we say, a bit long in the tooth. She wasn't worth much as a prostitute. Still, Hosea went, found her pimp, and paid him four times what she was worth. "This," Yahweh concluded, "Is how much I love you." I always read that book with a fearful certainty that god would one day make me marry a woman I would have to learn to love just to prove something. I think I missed the point. There's an old Rabbinical tradition that it was woman, not man, who marked the pinnacle of creation. Eve, after all, came last. Two thousand years of Christianity have gradually moved Eve from the position as ultimate to afterthought, kind of a little present for ol' Adam to play with. Even the feminist movement rejected Eve, though. We got stories of Lillith, the forgotten third party, the bad girl, Adam's first, real love. But the real reason that the tradition says that woman is the pinnacle is that the woman was born perfect, without any need to change. Men, however, are born slightly imperfect. This is the true meaning behind the tradition of circumcision. I found it funny that there would be such an idea when I first encountered it. It flew in the face of most of human history and the fact that women were blithely regarded as a second class, relegated to the status of property. Now I see that it's not mutually exclusive. I think there are a lot of men in the world who secretly or openly fear that women, or at least that one woman who is most important, are better than they are. That if she had her druthers, she'd go somewhere else. So men who don't understand this fear make property of women, beat them in to submission, accept the value of a diminished woman who will stay over a whole woman who might leave, who would if she was smart. In this, god is a cipher. See, Yahweh looked across creation and saw that it was good. Yahweh then created Man in his image and created Woman in his image. In his image, Yahweh created both. When Adam and Eve ate of the Tree of the Knowledge of Good and Evil, Yahweh cast them out of the Garden, but not for their transgressions. Yahweh, you see, looked across the Garden to the Tree of Life and realized that if they ate of that fruit, they would become as gods themselves. Later on the world decided to build a tower tall enough to stretch to Heaven itself. At the base of the Tower of Babel Yahweh cast confusion over the peoples, giving them different languages so they couldn't work together, for fear that if they did achieve their goal they would become as gods themselves. Yahweh created Hosea and Gomer. In his image, he created both. Yahweh, you see, had gotten tired of trying to beat the Chosen People in to submission. Hosea pursued a whore and Yahweh pursued Israel, each pursuer loving his bride in spite of himself. Yet in his image Yahweh created man and woman, Hosea and Gomer, cheater and cheated. In the Garden of Eden, Yahweh refused the chance for creation to become creator. At the cornerstone of Babel Yahweh refused to let creation decide its own fate. Time and time again, Yahweh treated the Chosen People as a recalcitrant lover. "I did all of these things for you. How do you not love me?" Smack. The carrot and the stick. The recourse to which a violent, stupid man turns when confronted with a woman who is better than him in every way, yet loves him for reasons he'll never understand. So what of Hosea? For that matter, what of Jesus? Were they, or at least their biographers, the exceptions to a book ostensibly about god written by violent and stupid men? Or did they understand something that even god didn't? See, we make god in our own image. This is an idea that's been around for a long time, but one that constantly evolves in meaning, at least for me. In his image Yahweh made them, man and woman both. In our image we make god. So what of me, the guy who read the book of Hosea and took away from it the notion that god would make him marry someone he didn't want to marry? What image did I hold of myself to make god in such a way? At some point, and I know approximately when that point was, I divided the female gender in to two categories: the girls I wanted and the girls I had a chance with. If you drew these groups in to a Venn diagram I can guarantee there was a lot of white space between the circles. This was a problem. So I created a third category: girls who I wanted but were, in some way, fucked up, generally in the head. I was, in short, creating my own category of Gomer. It was a category that said way more about me than it did about any member of the female gender. Every once in a while it worked, too. A girl came along who took what she wanted from me until she decided to leave. This, I assumed, was the pattern. This was Hosea and Gomer. This was my punishment, my purgatory, payment in full for my sins. For the life of me, I can't figure out what those sins were. Hell, I only just figured out what my real Gomer was. See, I'd assumed that my Gomer would be someone to whom I wasn't physically or intellectually attracted. She would be a Loathly Lady who never got around to transforming in to a beautiful maiden. In reality, though, she was a prostitute, giving herself to me for a time in exchange for more than I could well afford and more than she was worth. My last Gomer would have been there for me if I'd given her the chance. At least, I think so. It's hard to tell now, especially since she found ways to remind me that she had one foot out the door at all times and no matter how I tried to say I'd be there for her, she could never make the same promise. I think, too, that extracting that promise would have required a Faustian bargain that, by the end, I was unwilling and unable to make. She wouldn't have been in to a serious relationship with a non-Christian. I couldn't maintain the facade any more. When we move to escape from our problems we tend to find that it doesn't work. Our problems go in to the suitcases first. I left religion to escape from a petty jackass of a god who didn't like me very much. It didn't work. The petty jackass who didn't like me very much is me. I just blamed it on god for all these years. I still divide the female gender in to Gomers and Golden-Haired Women. I hold the latter at arm's length and tell myself that it's because I'm afraid they'll turn out to be ordinary, boring. I tell myself that the Gomers are the crazy girls, the ones who are interesting and fun. Truth is, I see the Golden-Haired Woman and assume that she doesn't need me. If she needs me she won't find it necessary to use me, to suck me dry. If she doesn't see the need to do that, I don't think she'll want me around. Yahweh made me in his image. I made him in mine. God and I are one. This is my truth. This is my therapy. And none of it matters unless theory becomes praxis. Knowing what I am doesn't matter unless I have the balls to change.

This is My Truth, Tell Me Yours, Part 5

What I wear like church clothes, You wear just like jewelry All the simple things you revel in, They just suffocate me And I don't know anymore, Wish someone would tell me who to be Because I'm ready, I'm ready to try anything -- Matt Nathanson, “Church Clothes” It’s fairly easy to tell the people who are willing to entertain doubt. If you say something that they disagree with, that gets close to their own questions, they’ll pause. It’s sometimes not a long pause, sometimes just a hitch, a facial tick. Doubt will be written across the other’s face or interwoven in their words. The ones who won’t entertain doubt are more obvious. They’re prepared to argue. They’ll get mad, even if there’s nothing to get mad about. Sometimes they’ll pretend to agree with the doubt, though. They’ll agree a little too quickly, a little too smoothly, selling you their worldview through your doubt like a used car salesman pouncing on an approving comment about a car’s upholstery. Questions flew at me fast and furious that night. We’d wandered in to foreign territory for her, dangerous territory. Evolution, science, that great empirical challenge to faith. She battered me with her words, asking questions faster than I could answer, challenging every little word I said before I finally had to tap out. She tried to blame me for it, too. “I told you that when I start asking questions I can be relentless,” she said. “You told me you could handle it. I guess you were wrong.” She questioned my manhood. But the truth is that we had discussions and disagreements before and after, some spirited, some pointless, some serious, but none like that. There was something in those questions that night, something that let me know that we could not be friends any more if I went through with my journey away from faith. Well, I didn’t know that part quite then. I would give myself far too much credit, as it would be tantamount to claiming I could predict the reaction someone would have to an action I did not know I would take. I remembered that conversation later, though. When I counted the costs I knew that friendship would be one, even if I didn’t want to admit it. Even if I didn’t want to think about it. Paul Simon was right as he drove across the cradle of the Civil War, assured that when he reached that which he sought, Graceland would accept him in. Losing love is like a window in the heart. You’re exposed, vulnerable to the world, blown by the wind. The funny thing is, I now believe Paul Simon. I, too, have reason to believe I will be received in Graceland. I, too, travel there with ghosts and empty sockets, unsure of whether I will have to defend myself, my decisions, my loves lost, my love never offered, my love withdrawn. Or maybe it won’t matter. Maybe we’ll all understand in Graceland. Maybe it’s the place we all go when we realize that we no longer have answers. Maybe it’s the place we long for because we can find nothing else. During the times between the conversation and the end she used to tell me that she wished I could see god as she saw god. My god was vindictive and petty, hers loving and accepting. At times I wish I could track her down, tell her I understand. But that seems a cruel trick, since I would have to tell her I gave up belief for understanding and then understanding did not lead back to belief. Truth is, I don’t think I could handle seeing her shake her head sadly and say she wished I wasn’t so lost again. I don’t think she would listen to me say that I’m not lost, that I can’t be lost. That if there is neither origin nor terminus there can be no path and, therefore, no way to get lost. Point C doesn’t matter if there is no Point A or Point B. All there is to find is the desire of the heart. This is where I get in trouble, because my desire isn’t for love, my desire isn’t for answers, my desire isn’t for wealth or power. My desire, the true desire of my heart is knowledge. Those who desire love can find it. Those who desire answers can accept any that seem reasonable. Those that desire wealth and power can accumulate both. We who desire knowledge can only accumulate questions and riddles. Answers are only temporary, little abstract collections of words to be challenged, approached in different ways, tested, viewed with skepticism. They are the golden-haired woman dazzling our eyes with luminescence across a darkened, crowded room. I can see her, the golden-haired woman across the room. She is there, all bright hair, blue eyes, smiles. And beauty. Aching, unreachable beauty. While she is there on the other side of the room I wonder what it would be like to approach her, ask her name, tell her mine, suggest we get out of there, find someplace quiet. Somehow, amazingly, improbably, impossibly, she leaves with me. Minutes, hours, days, centuries pass while we talk, share, laugh, fall in love. Somehow morning comes, wrapped in my chocolate sheets, encircled by the tan walls of my bedroom. We get up and spend the morning on my brown couch pretending the blue walls of my living room are the sky and we are floating in it while Paul Simon sings of the roots of rhythm under African skies and Mike Doughty tells us about a luminous girl, tells us about her, tells us about Jesus. For that’s what Jesus is. The Christ, the Messiah, is the luminous girl across the room. Salvation is that thing we always seek but never find, always pursue but never catch. And the plain and simple truth is that we should never catch up to salvation. We should cross the room and find that Jesus isn’t there, that the luminous girl has slipped away. The alternative is worse. As sad as it is to get to the destination and find out it’s moved, the true disappointment comes when the destination turns out to be nothing, mundane, somehow less or worse than expected. What do you do when Graceland turns out to be a bloated tourist trap, the luminous girl uninteresting, the Christ nothing but a Sunday School story? Worse, what do you do if Graceland doesn’t receive you, the luminous girl has a boyfriend, the Christ is not full of grace and love? I used to hate it when I read the works of a great thinker or philosopher and they never gave me any answers. They would work up to point, then never quite make it and instead offer up riddles, stories, examples, analogies. “Give me the damn answers!” I always wanted to yell at the pages. “If you’re so smart why can’t you give a simple answer?” Now here I am, writing riddles, analogies, stories, and examples. I can’t talk about knowledge except to compare it to women who aren’t what I’d hoped, a Christ who offers no salvation, or a Paul Simon song. It seems so unsatisfying to say that the truth is there is no truth. It seems inappropriate to worry about the loss of a friendship that I fully admit was going nowhere, anyway. What else is there to say save that I am a charlatan? I expect the answers to be there even as I expect them to be unsatisfying. I expect the luminous girl to live up to my otherworldly expectations. I expected Jesus to answer my doubts with certainties, my visions of an angry, petty god with love. I expected to be received in Graceland, but wanted Graceland to come to me. I don’t know when I gave up on Christianity, but I think it was earlier than I ever calculated and easier than I ever wanted to admit. The problem is that I kept the vestiges, cloaked myself in the fears, wanted the framework because it was easier than building one on my own. I played at religion for the answers, maintained the illusion for the respect it garnered me. I was more interested in appearing religious than I was in actually being religious. In the end my charlatanism got me nowhere. It probably did me more harm than good and it probably allowed me to hurt others more than I will ever know. We were very alike, my former friend and I. Maybe a little too much alike. She told me once that she was more interested in appearing good than in actually being good. I think that’s why the defenses came up in that long ago conversation, why as I drifted farther and farther away from our shared religion she liked me less and less. I think she worried that if she kept me close then she, too, would find herself on the same path, than she might have to admit that appearing good wasn’t the same thing as being good. In truth, she had far more to lose than I ever did, and possibly nothing to gain. She did not desire the same thing I did. While I desired knowledge, she desired acceptance. Knowledge is impeded by charlatanism while acceptance revels in it. Truth had to win out for me but not for her and in that were set the seeds of destruction. They say that time heals all wounds. They also say that absence makes the heart grow fonder. These seem, to me, incompatible. I can tell you almost exactly how long it’s been since I walked away from my friend in a fit of righteous indignation. I could give a long list of reasons why what I did was the right thing. I could even tell you why it was best for her and why, in the long run, it didn’t matter because there was no future in that relationship. Yet I can also tell you that I’ve thought about her every day since. I’ve wondered where she went to. I’ve wondered what went wrong. I’ve wondered if there was something, somewhere, that I could have, should have done different. I’ve wondered what I would say if she were sitting on my brown couch in my blue living room listening to Mike Doughty sing about luminous girls and Jesus Christ and Graceland and all the answers that just turn out to be more questions. I wonder if she would shake her head sadly and say she wishes I weren’t so lost. I wonder if I would disagree.

This is My Truth, Tell Me Yours, Part 4

I seen off god and devil, too With no weapon, just the truth Belief does not existence make It’s only in your mind – Oasis, “The Nature of Reality” There’s a great show on The History Channel called UFO Hunters. There are three guys that go around looking in to UFO sightings and stories. There’s The Old Guy, The Scientist, and The Other Guy. The Old Guy is a True Believer, while The Scientist is, well, a scientist, and The Other Guy is a skeptic. I was watching an episode the other day that was focused on alien abduction. They found people who had physical “evidence” of their abduction. The Scientist looked at it using science and in a very scientific manner said, “This evidence is inconclusive.” The basic idea is, “We don’t know how this got here, but the evidence shows there’s nothing special about it and in the absence of anything conclusive other than the story itself, science can prove nothing.” The episode then ended with the three sitting around a desk. The Old Guy had this to say:

“We’ve taken technology and applied it to UFOlogy. Rarely is that done in this field. The debunker will always say to you, ‘You haven’t proven the existence of a UFO,’ as if you’ve gotta produce the UFO on the table for it to be true. But on the other hand, the UFOlogist will say, ‘Well you haven’t disproven the UFO, show me something that says this is anything but a UFO.’ And you know what? We have not found one thing to disprove that there’s an extraterrestrial presence affecting us on planet Earth, interfering with our lives, and traveling through our skies.” (Ah, the DVR…)

The camera kept going to The Other Guy during this soliloquy. He kept leaning forward and blinking. And it wasn’t just regular blinking, it was long, forceful blinks followed by him opening his eyes as wide as possible. I think I know what he was thinking, because I was doing a similar thing. I was thinking, “Wow, the UFOlogist is a dumbass.” See, science says that if you’re trying to prove a new hypothesis, you need actual, provable evidence. Therefore, if you want to prove the existence of UFOs, you have to put a UFO “on the table.” Or, falling short of that, you have to put incontrovertible proof of extraterrestrial material on the table. Until that can be done, inconclusive evidence does not, by default, prove the existence of UFOs, it does exactly the opposite, arguments of the True Believer notwithstanding. I wore my own True Belief like an ill-fitting suit, like church clothes, if you will. I brought it out when it was appropriate, wore it around uncomfortably, aware of all the little itches and mislaid seams, then shrugged it off as quickly as possible when no one was around who would notice or care. It’s why at the end of my time with Christianity I took refuge in my non-Christian friends or those Christians who, like me, could no longer quite see the point. Yet there are still some days when I long for that old, worn suit of clothes I hated so much. Perhaps it’s simply the nature of what I did and how I left, but there are times when I long for the comfort, not of True Belief itself, but of what it represents. Certainty. The ability to, just for a moment, step out to the edge, look over the yawning abyss, and believe it’s not there. I have a genuine problem with people who equate religious belief with mental illness, even if I do think that evangelical Christianity nearly drove me insane. If religion is a mental illness, then it’s simply one aspect of an illness that’s shared by every person I’ve ever come across: the need to believe in something, anything, larger. The Old Guy on UFO Hunters is a True Believer, the dude who dresses like Nostradamus and shows up on, like, every History Channel special about Ol’ Nosty quoting random quatrains out of context and trying to argue that when Nostradamus said “Southern France” he meant “The Great Plains” and when he said “the seventh month of 1999” he meant “September 11th, 2001,” is a True Believer. They are different kinds, but they’re exhibiting the same mental deficiency that the religious True Believer exhibits, that all humans exhibit. We all worship, not at the altar of god, but at the altar of belief. This is the problem we have to deal with. We rarely fight a battle of ideologies, or religions, or even fundamental truths. We usually fight each other in battles of belief. Beliefs are powerful, beliefs are often good, but when we confuse our beliefs with our religion or ideology, everyone loses. Beliefs infuse our world with meaning. But they’re fragile and often lack the necessary robustness to withstand scrutiny. The more we identify with our beliefs, the more fearful we become of seeing them get upset. For most of human history that didn’t matter. Subjective belief was all the human mind could work with. There was little or no tested objective truth to counter subjective belief. Wars of ideology solved nothing, but they also never destroyed beliefs on either side. It’s now possible for one side to destroy the other. Science vs. religion might actually create a zero-sum situation. At the very least, a lot of people seem to believe it does. Combine that with the fact that we seem to be experiencing an upsurge of apocalyptic millennialism and we’re in for a bad time. This is why we keep seeing specials on Nostradamus and Revelation and hearing about the Mayan 2012 “end of the world prophecy.” Millennial hysteria is nothing new and I’m not one to join in to the “worst ever” hubbub, as I think everyone has a tendency to want to say they have the best or worst ever, not because they believe it, but because they want to feel special, and somehow more important than anyone else. But I will say this: we have a remarkable convergence of opportunities to fearing the end of the world that may well have never existed before. Getting tired of Revelation? Go find Mayan prophecies. Tired of expecting god to do it? You can find terrorists with dirty bombs or Korean nuclear missiles to fear. Want bigger problems? There’s global warming or giant asteroids or alien invasions. And unlike people of past centuries who only got their end of the world prophecies at church, we’ve been hearing about it on TV, in movies, in books, and in school our entire lives. Add to that the fact that we’re the heirs of religious apocalyptic fear and the mutually assured destruction of the Cold War and we live in a world with no shortage of terror. In the face of the terror of the abyss, the existential crisis of conflicts of belief can tear connections asunder. On a societal level we see the conflict of cultures or the fight between the religious right and the liberal left. But there’s a field on which the conflict plays out every day that rarely, if ever, make the news. There’s a fairly common story among converts to a new religion. In extremes, the convert is shunned, persecuted, or even killed. In more mundane terms marriages or friendships or family ties are strained, sometimes to the breaking point. These stories of persecution are often used – in some cases exaggerated or just plain invented – to rally the faithful. But they work from the other direction, too. I learned an important lesson about friendship when I left religion behind. Some of my friends stuck with me. Some of them didn’t. Some tried to get me back in the fold and ultimately abandoned me. Some of them acted like my decision was a personal affront to them. In addition to friends, though, I lost the ability to even pretend for True Belief. True Belief is much easier than having to actually consider morality, or confront the fact that in a world without a god, without an afterlife, we only have to answer to each other and ourselves. It also means that we can’t sit around waiting for Revelation or Nostradamus to be proved right. The world won’t suddenly end. We don’t get a “Get Out of Existence Free” card or a mulligan to the next life. We have to find truth. Or, barring that, we have to admit that there is no truth except that which we can make for ourselves. That’s much, much harder than simply passively accepting received truth and behaving accordingly, even if that truth has to be worn like an ill-fitting suit.

This is My Truth, Tell Me Yours, Part 3

Oooh, give me something to believe So many down on their knees It baffles me, baffles me Oooh, give me something to believe So many down on their knees It baffles me, baffles me --Lucky Boys Confusion, "Something to Believe" It happened about two years ago. I was finishing my last semester up at Western and spending just about every other weekend back at home, mostly because of Her. I'd pick up an Emergent-style Sunday night service at my church, then head back, usually pretty late, again because of Her. The night in question the church was doing a special Sunday night service. Bill Hybels, the founder of Willow Creek, Chicago's own Six Flags Over Jesus, was doing an interview with Bono that was being simulcast at churches all over the country. It was during the height of the One campaign and Bono was trying to drum up support from the sleeping giant of social movements: the evangelical/fundamentalist church. After the simulcast we had a conversation about how crazy it was that Bono was putting so much effort in to positioning himself as an evangelical Christian. We both knew he wasn't one, we both knew that what he was saying was probably a damn good idea and there wasn't anything that should keep a Christian from getting behind it. But we both knew that he had to play that card to drum up the necessary support. It was sad, we decided. Bono was basically manipulating evangelical Christians in to doing their Christian duty to help others. Fast forward a couple years. I was asking the wife of a Lutheran pastor what they were doing for Thanksgiving. She told me they were taking Thanksgiving to the convalescent center where her mother-in-law lives, which was good because it allowed them to share dinner with some of the residents who don't have family. "You're just too disgustingly good, you know that?" I asked. "You're making the rest of us look bad." "Oh, no, we're not that good." "You don't understand. I came from the evangelical tradition, where everyone is totally focused on making sure that they look like they're good and never actually get around to doing good." "Well we know we're bad, so we just go and do what we're supposed to do." That night I got an email. It was a mass email update I get on a regular basis from an itinerant evanglist I knew out in the western extremes of the state. I'd love to stop getting the emails, but I have a perverse fascination with reading them, email no longer has that helpful "block sender" feature, and this is the last guy to whom I want to explain why I don't want to get his emails anymore. I don't want to be evangelized to in general, and definitely not from him specifically. Anyway, the email was a desperate plea for help. He knew a guy who liked a different kind of church than his wife and didn't know what to tell the guy, so he aired the dude's laundry out to a lot of people on the internet in a mass mailing. My response was, "So the fuck what," especially since it was pretty clear from the email that it wasn't, like, tearing the marriage apart or anything. These three stories form the backbone of an idea that I never really got around to articulating in this post. Tayi was absolutely right to point out in this comment and blog post that we can survive just fine as a culture without a strong Christian component, thank you very much. We don't need a temple of Zeus down the street to appreciate The Illiad, after all. The same thing probably goes for a church and Craig Ferguson's Between the Bridge and the River. Pop culture, too, is doing just fine without Over the Rhine, Eric Peters, and The Elms. And, to be perfectly honest, given a choice between making sure everyone has a chance to get rocked out by The Elms in the workman-like fashion one would expect of a band from Indiana and removing the entire concept of Nickelback from rock music history, I'd probably choose the latter. It's the mathematics of addition by subtraction working against the lads of The Elms. Culture as a whole, however, suffers from the walls surrounding evangelical Christianity. Think of how much time was wasted last Christmastime with the breathless reports from the front lines of the "War on Christmas." Think of all the people who voted yes on Prop 8 because they've been told that a prime component of Christianity requires a belief that homosexuality is a sin against god. And if you think that the separation of pop culture and the larger culture isn't intertwined, I've got bad news. The One campaign was an absolute no-brainer for Christians to get behind. It's right there in the Bible. The early Christians sold what they had and gave to others according to their need (gasp! Communism! Except not really, but I don't really feel like going in to the nuances of communal living as depicted in Acts 2 v. Communism just now). There's also a strong flavor of the Old Testament in evangelical Christianity, but very little mention of the Year of Jubilee, the commandment of the Lord to return all land to its original owner every fifty years, which came at the end of a cycle of seven periods wherein all debts were to be forgiven on the seventh year. And, for that matter, one doesn't even need to go back to the Old Testament to get the Year of Jubilee. The passage given most often as the official start of Jesus' ministry on Earth was when he walked in to a synagogue and read from the scrolls. Which passage did he read? The one that claimed release of the captives and the Year of the Lord's Favor, i.e. the Year of Jubilee. What is Bono's One campaign, exactly? Third World debt-relief. It might not come on a seven- or fifty-year cycle, but that sure as hell sounds like a Year of Jubilee to me. So why did Bono have to sit down with a celebrity pastor and talk the evangelical talk to try to sell the Year of Jubilee to people who are supposedly Jesus's representatives on Earth? Because evangelical Christian culture is dedicated to some of the most pointless navel-gazing possible. Many, if not most, in that world will not do anything unless it's an idea properly vetted by an appropriate authority, like, say, celebrity megachurch pastor Bill Hybels. Then, of course, there was the farce of the McCain/Obama forum at Saddleback Church during the election. Rick Warren never openly supported either candidate, but the questions he asked were the evangelical talking points, on which Obama delivered thoughtful answers (save the whole, "That's above my pay grade," one on abortion, for which he later expressed regret) that didn't satisfy the crowd, while McCain gave the appropriate talking point responses as if reading from a teleprompter and looking like he was trying to summon the words in a poorly learned, non-native language and got rousing applause. Rick Warren was fortunate I had no respect for him to begin with, because that little stunt would have lost me forever. You don't get to be unbiased just because you say you are, Ricky-boy. Technically speaking, pop culture might not be diminished by the exclusion of Christian pop culture. Hell, in the case of PlusOne it's probably made slightly better (then again, I saw the Jonas Brothers for the first time during the halftime show of the Cowboys/Seahawks game. That's five minutes of my life I'll never get back). But that split on seemingly pointless grounds is indicative of a much larger and more worrisome split. It's like, for instance, someone wasting their time worrying that some guy is going to Hell because he goes to a different church than his wife or some such. Oh, and the root of the problem wasn't theology, but worship style. Like it or not, Christians are here and will be here for the foreseeable future. The strongest representatives we have of Christianity, though, are the jackasses and con artists. That's mostly because the people we should be looking towards as Christian examples are too busy making Thanksgiving dinner for people who don't have family to rant and rave on television or write self-serving books about how to be the "right kind" of Christian. And, for the record, this is an exact mirror of the problem with Islam at the moment. Osama Bin Laden does not represent Islam any more than Fred Phelps represents Christianity. There was a recent incident where a bunch of guys who were probably paid by Al Qaeda threw acid on girls going to school in Pakistan. The attackers were captured and will probably be killed and a Pakistani official said, in reference to the attack, "This is not Islam." It might be more horrific than any stories we have in the United States right now, but there are a lot of Christians who would say the exact same thing about their religion while shaking their heads at Fred Phelps and his God Hates Fags campaign. Yet a lot of those same Christians out in California voted yes on Prop 8 back a couple weeks ago. If asked, they would probably say something to the effect of, "I don't have anything against gays, but I don't think they should be allowed to get married." I've got news for you. If you're going to construct a sentence with, "I don't have anything against [these people], but I just don't think they should be allowed [this right]," then you have something against them. Change it to, "I don't have anything against black people, but I don't think they should be allowed to vote," and you're a bigoted jackass. You're not allowed to not be a bigoted jackass just because the civil rights in question don't have to do with the color of another guy's skin or because you think it's a totally gross when two dudes get it on. Gay marriage is a civil issue. Marriage, as far as it is attached to the law code of the United States, has nothing to do with marriage within the church. It's the same word, but with two different meanings, much like I could say "cool" and be referring to temperature or popularity and you would know of what I speak due to context. So when I say "marriage" as a civil union issue, I'm talking about rights and discrimination. The fact is, too, that for a while I was one of those, "Well call them civil unions and let's get on with our lives," people. I'm not anymore. Call them marriages. First of all, again, it's an issue of semantics. Second, this falls under Plessy v. Ferguson and Brown v. Board and that whole thorny "separate but equal" thing. And we have to talk about this as a civil rights issue. We have to talk about it as a societal issue. It's not just about sex or the shape of genitalia. It's about next of kin rights and hospital visitations and insurance coverage. Adam's work is legally obligated to allow him to cover Eve under his insurance policy, but wouldn't be if it were Steve. If Adam dies without a will, Eve is the default recipient of his estate. Steve isn't. These aren't small things. These aren't to be taken lightly. As long as we're building a wall between Christian and non-Christian in America we will not be able to move forward as a society. The pop culture divide allows Christians to build their own parallel world where they have their own rock music and book stores and movies and websites and everything else. It also allows them to have their own panicked discourse about how they will be forced to let their kids learn that homosexuality is okay in their schools or be horrified by the words "Happy Holidays" at the mall. It allows them to think there's something subversive in believing in Jesus. The worst part about it is, though, that those on the other side of the wall won't be able to have discourse with them. Schools should be teaching that homosexuality is okay. It's not going to turn a straight kid gay, but it might well help that straight kid decide not to beat up the gay kid. Isn't that a good thing? Should I even have to ask? Since they are quite powerful, both politically and monetarily, it also forces someone like Bono to pander to them to get them to sign on with the One campaign. Even if the One campaign is the sort of thing that should have been started in a church, not forced through the doors by a pop star with an English-Christianese dictionary.

This is My Truth, Tell Me Yours, Part 2

I thought that we’d be Further along by now I can’t remember how We stumbled to this place I loved you like a long lost brother On a bad day maybe I thought why bother I’ve seldom seen so much anger In a face I wanna do better I wanna try harder I wanna believe Down to the letter -- Over the Rhine, “Long Lost Brother” There is a nearly universally used name that gets thrown in to the ring when the topic of villains comes up in Christian circles. It’s a name that practically jumps out of the mouths of people who are trying to explain why Christianity is in deep, deep trouble. The villain is seen as the product of an intractable, backwards-thinking religiosity that’s dangerous to America, especially since many of the public appearances this person makes involve him calling down wrath on America for its decadent, irreligious lifestyle. I speak, of course, of Pat Robertson. Other names come up, too. James Dobson gets a lot of vitriol and Jerry Falwell still gets plenty of posthumous flak. Those who pay more attention bring up Tim LaHaye, D. James Kennedy (who also recently died), and Chuck Colson while those of us who watch emerging trends are keeping an eye on Ron Luce (but I have seen very few people within Christianity who are worried about Teen Mania and BattleCry, which worries me in and of itself). Still, no one invites negative rhetoric from his supposed religious peers quite like Pat Robertson. Unfortunately, both for those inside evangelicalism and those without – whether we’re talking about atheists, Muslims, or Presbyterians – Pat Robertson, James Dobson, and a legion of nameless, faceless publishers, bookstore owners, small town pastors, and website administrators who share their values still function as the gatekeepers of Christian culture.* As long as they serve this role, Christianity will continue to build an alternate, history-less culture within America that serves to diminish both sides of the divide and increase the rancor and hateful language tossed back and forth across the wall. The problem with the gatekeepers is that they are far more interested in dogma and “proper” theology than art and therefore force an unnecessary cultural divide and an oversimplification of Christian thought. This oversimplification of Christian thought, in turn, encourages an oversimplified projection of non-Christian thought and an oversimplification of the human experience. So non-Christians are cast as blathering idiots who just don’t get it at best or hateful enemies at worst and those non-Christians respond with little charity because, well, everyone hates being stuffed in to a tiny box, especially if the one doing the stuffing hasn’t bothered to learn anything beyond their own wrong-headed projections. The truth is, too, that gates might be effective in keeping dangerous ideas out, but they function quite well at keeping things trapped inside, too. A siege, even if self-imposed, may keep the ravening hordes at bay, but it does little for the development of the besieged. Fields lie fallow, industries sit dormant, and the exchange of goods, services, and information is choked off. It doesn’t have to be that way, and there’s a very good chance that leaving the gates open and realizing there is no enemy waiting to storm the keep would be extremely good for those locked away in self-imposed exile from the world. Much ado is being made about how Christian pop culture is catching up with secular pop culture. This may be the case, but the fact is that even after supposedly gaining so much ground, it’s already evidence that Christian culture has lost a tremendous amount in the intervening years. It’s a tired and old argument, but the fact is that Flannery O’Connor, J.R.R. Tolkien and Dostoyevsky were Christians who wrote classics of Western fiction, but there is basically zero chance that you’d be able to walk in to a Christian bookstore today and buy their works. The Christian experience is further limited by the fact that the gatekeepers spend a lot of time frowning on things, so it’s almost necessary to limit music and books to lists of how great god is and put a Bridge Diagram and conversion scene in to everything. The limitations placed on the authors and artists who try to work within the strict guidelines are unreal. I have on the hard drive of my laptop a manuscript from a book I tried to write to sell as Christian fiction that will probably never see the light of day because the need to reach that climactic conversion scene corrupts the plot. The fact that the characters can’t swear or have sex or engage in any number of other questionable and human activities means that, even when fully fleshed out, they seem a thin and a little too much like cardboard. Art, as the saying goes, imitates life. Art cannot, therefore, have limitations placed on it. If there are limitations it no longer seeks to imitate life but define it. Art becomes propaganda. Craig Ferguson’s Between the Bridge and the River is one of the most amazingly uplifting and deeply Christian books I’ve ever read. I do not think that it’s possible to appreciate the book fully without being steeped in Christian philosophy, theology, liturgy, and language. It was, I truly believe, instrumental in my ability to finally come to terms with my own anger upon leaving Christianity and my burgeoning ability to appreciate and respect the religion in a way that I never could while I was within the throes of evangelicalism. Yet Between the Bridge and the River would never be sold in a Christian bookstore. Even if Ferguson wanted to try he would never make it past the gatekeepers. It includes extra-marital sex, drug use, acceptance of homosexuality, prostitution, negative depictions of pastors and televangelists, violence, and crime. Even though it is a story of redemption, acceptance, love, and grace just as clearly as the Christ story is, there’s no way it would be allowed. There is, however, a thirst for complicated depictions of religion within the Christian world, even those who are within the evangelical pop culture. Even a decade after it came out (and several years after it was completely ruined by the craptastic sequels), evangelicals love The Matrix. U2 is practically accepted as a Christian band. A few years ago Evanescence was actually sold briefly in Christian music stores because they had a song that kinda-sorta sounded like it was Christian. I think it would be good for Christians to read Craig Ferguson’s book. I also think it would be good for them to listen to Mike Doughty’s “Like a Luminous Girl.” And since they love U2 so much, it might behoove them to wrestle with the theology of The Waterboys’ “Glastonbury Song” and sing the soaring, pained, almost liturgical “You in the Sky” instead of the latest “Rah rah Jesus!” chorus to come out of Hillsong. Inviting the world in also might help in teaching an important lesson. Pop culture is constantly dismissed as silly and much of it is. The old saw says that 90% of everything is crap and that applies to pop culture like anything else. But pop culture is also a way of tracking our immediate history. The music I still love from the ‘90s was my generation’s musicians’ attempt to appreciate and incorporate the rock of the ‘70s in their own world. Seattle grunge didn’t spring full-formed from the ether. It was built from Led Zeppelin, Black Sabbath, and The Stooges. Oasis and The Verve, similarly, were influenced by The Beatles and The Rolling Stones. The bands of my teen years now influence bands that are rising to prominence and kids who are playing guitars in their room and dreaming of their turn on the stage. CCM, or Contemporary Christian Music, has no such drive to learn from the previous generation of music. The CCM drive is to copy whatever is popular (or, really, whatever was popular a couple years ago) and interweave that with praise music, which is intentionally simplistic, easy to memorize and, basically, artless. It rewards mediocrity, eschews innovation, and punishes any acts that are good enough to get mainstream exposure by accusing them of selling out. And selling out in Christianity doesn’t just involve your artistic integrity, but your eternal salvation. Seriously, there are still Christians out there who hate Amy Grant like Vietnam POWs hate Jane Fonda. True art, like philosophy and thought, has to grow over time. When Barack Obama recently included the concept of a house divided against itself in a speech he wasn’t just making up pretty words. He was recalling, and therefore connecting himself to, the words of another untried Illinois politician who took the office of President at a time when the country was deeply divided along ideological lines. Abraham Lincoln, in turn, was connecting himself to that wellspring of Western culture, Jesus Christ. We recall our history, whether we’re talking politics or punk rock, to learn from our past, innovate, and connect with each other through the common bonds of culture, memory, and shared experience. Christian pop culture, therefore, is seen as parasitical. Those within the Christian pop bubble, meanwhile, focus relentlessly on the wrong things. They try to prove that the latest CCM retread is as good as, if not better than, the secular artists it ripped off, then try to listen to the music for the message – not the art – and try to get others to do so, too. Whenever they try to appeal to history, they grab on to the post-conversion works of Johnny Cash or Bob Dylan and claim them, an act that seems almost deserving of scorn, like if I tried to claim Ron Santo as the greatest White Sox player in history because he played one season on the South Side. Meanwhile, the truly sad thing is that there is a vibrant Christian culture growing around the fringes of Christian pop culture that gets little respect because there’s little mainstream attention and the fringe acts have a hard time getting around the gatekeepers due to their complicated, sometimes ambiguous message. I speak of folk singers like Andrew Peterson, Eric Peters, and Mitch McVicker: highly talented artists who wish to glorify their god through their art and honestly believe that the core of glorification through art involves the understanding of craft and creation of genuinely good works. I speak of The Elms, a rock band capable of holding their own with any band on mainstream rock radio. Above all I speak of Over the Rhine, a band that may well be one of the most talented musical acts in the world and one that bears the signs of influence from jazz, classical, bluegrass, folk, cabaret, and every genre of music in between while filling their songs with praise, awe, disappointment, doubt, love, anger, and humanity. Yet Over the Rhine has been around for nearly twenty years and I didn’t know about them until after I left Christianity. Something is very wrong when a cultural group can have genuine talent that it refuses to celebrate and nurture because it would prefer to nurture insularity and propaganda. In ignoring Over the Rhine in favor of Mercy Me Christianity diminishes itself. More than that, it spits on its legacy as the cultural movement that brought us Dante, Bach, Handel, the Sistine Chapel, Flannery O’Connor, and Kierkegaard. It’s sad, too, since so much of Western art, allegory, and society rests firmly on its Christian roots. I fear that by allowing and even celebrating the gates around Christian culture we have diminished ourselves. We may not need to turn to Jesus for our salvation, but we do need to turn to him to understand our society. *That was an awesomely tortured sentence. I’m pretty sure that I put a hyphenated interior thought at the end of a comma splice. My high school English teachers would be so proud.

This is My Truth, Tell Me Yours

Wooden Jesus, where are you from? Korea or Canada or maybe Taiwan Well I didn't know it was the Holy Land But I believed from the minute the check left my hand And I pray Can I be saved? I spent all my money on a future grave Wooden Jesus I'll cut you in On twenty percent of my future sin --Temple of the Dog, "Wooden Jesus" I picked up a copy of Daniel Radosh's Rapture Ready!* at the suggestion of the eminent evangelical blogger Fred Clark. It's a fantastic book by a liberal Jew who decided to wander around in the Christian subculture for a while. In many ways its like Jeff Sharlet and Peter Manseau's Killing the Buddha, but rather than trying to understand religion as a whole, Radosh tried to specifically understand what the deal is with, well, the sort of people I used to hang out with. He starts, appropriately enough, in the crass Christian Commercialism of the Christian Booksellers Association convention, sorting through the Jesus junk in an attempt to understand why anyone would bother to buy in to such a world. It's actually entirely possible to learn everything you need to know about the current state of evangelical Christianity from the second paragraph of the first chapter. That doesn't mean the book should be put down after that, because the journey just gets more bizarre from there, but the story of the guy trying to tap in to the pirate zeitgeist to save your immortal soul pretty much tells the tale (er, sings the sea shanty?) of the world I was so glad to leave behind.

[Hugh] Sparks is going to ensure that in the year to come, Christians bookstores across America will carry his company's new line of Jolly Roger auto decals, with messages like "Christian Pirates: Bound to the Code" and "Dead Man for Christ." These stickers will then be purchased by some of the 100 million Americans who shop in Christian stores, so that one day, when you are driving down the highway, you will see one on the car ahead of you. Perhaps you will have just watched the latest Pirates of the Caribbean sequel, and you will think to yourself, Why, yes, being a Christian is a lot like being a free-spirited rogue who sails the seven seas in search of adventure. By tapping in to the pirate zeitgeist, the Christian in the car in front of you will have planted a seed in your heart, and then one day -- Blam! You're saved. And the next thing you know, you're buying a Christian decal to put on your car.

Seeing as how the visit was in 2006 and I have yet to see Christian pirates rival "Warning: In the Case of Rapture, Car will be Unmanned"** stickers, I don't think Mr. Sparks has gotten too far. However, the fact remains that there are plenty of crappy, crappy Christian bumper stickers in the world, along with Jesus fish, Jesus t-shirts, Jesus Guitar Hero, Jesus Dance Dance Revolution, and whatever the hell this thing is out there in the world. The saddest thing about most of the Jesus junk is that there are any number of poor, misguided souls who actually think it's a valuable witnessing tool to the blathering mob of idiotic heathens who make their decisions based on a five dollar rectangle of plastic permanently glued to the bumper of the car parked in front of them during rush hour. However, and this is why Radosh's book should be read for more than a single paragraph, he brings up the much more interesting topic of Christian postmodernism later on in the first chapter. In it he quotes a professor William Romanowski, on the benefits of the use of postmodernism:

...[S]houldn't Christian perspectives be afforded a place in our public discourse? [In postmodern society] Christian artists and critics should not adopt an attitude of "This is what we believe and it's true. Take it or leave it." But something like, "This is what life looks like from our perspective. What do you make of it?" (Second bracket's Radosh's.)

The interesting thing is, as someone who was completely bought in to the Christian postmodernist movement, I can say unequivocally that this is completely wrong. And it's more than a little annoying. But, as with a lot of the problems with evangelical Christianity these days, you have to be outside the bubble to see the problems. I met someone not so long ago. He seemed like a decent enough guy. One day I was talking to him and I attempted to make a reference to the Wheaton Public Library, but instead slipped and said, "Wheaton Bible Church," probably because this was right about the time that I was best man in a wedding at said church and was experiencing the Monstrosity on North for the first time. It was just a more immediate three-word place name starting with "Wheaton" than the town's top-ranked public library. I basically watched his eyes light up when I used the word "church" and saw him verbally pounce on it and all I could think was, "Oh, shit." Suddenly I was roped in to a conversation on the topic of religion. This, of course, is where the, "Oh, shit," came from. Because I didn't just know the playbook he was using. I wrote that playbook for a couple of different ministries. Quite frankly, if anybody deserves to be hoisted by his own petard on this issue it's me, but that doesn't make me feel any better about it. I eventually managed to shoo him away after he'd made any number of offers to, y'know, be friends and hang out and talk about religion. Or football. Or whatever. Now whenever I see my own personal reminder of the stupidity of the religion I once knew I try to avoid being seen by him, for I know I'm about to get this extremely fake, "Hey! How are you doing?" It's like a mini purgatory, but I'm alive to enjoy it. However, I realized something interesting about the whole thing a little later. The move to abandon traditional apologetics and move to the postmodern stance as articulated by Romanowski is a tacit admission of the failure of traditional apologetics, but the postmodern lifestyle evangelism approach is actually less likely to work. What the lifestyle evangelist basically does is set his or her personal narrative against my personal narrative and in the completely subjective world of personal narratives, mine always trumps yours (and, um, that's the editorial "mine" and "yours"). There's an additional level of difficulty the lifestyle evangelizer bring upon him- or herself in that they are compelled to hold to a limited framework -- often made even more limited by a lack of understanding of any church tradition that existed before, oh, last week -- while the evangelizee has no such difficulty and is free to basically make up any personal narrative they want and incorporate anything from the Bhagavad Gita to then newest album by The Killers. This is, of course, absolutely nothing new. American attitudes towards religion in the 21st Century can be considered analogous to Roman attitudes towards religion in the 1st Century. The idea of religious festival as public spectacle/mystery cult is largely missing from the American religious framework, but the Romans did get the benefit of Alexander the Great's innovative bit of cultural conquest wherein he co-opted local gods as aspects of the divine that were also present in the Greek pantheon. The Romans brought that concept in to their own conquests because it was a highly useful form of assimilation. Meanwhile, this is why we have a bizarre and obviously out of touch Christian subculture with its own language, ideals, and an inability to understand why Sarah Palin is not the Vice President-elect right now. There is a growing parallel Christian pop culture that wants to believe it is capable of matching itself to secular pop culture. Unfortunately, as with the pirates for Jesus idea, it is often a culture created by ripping off regular pop culture in a sort of deaf and blind, five years out of date way. For instance, they ooh and aah over Kirk Cameron and Stephen Baldwin while the rest of us say, "Huh. He's still alive. Look at that." Moreover, the eternal need to focus relentlessly on Jesus and the weird system of check-marks by which the Christian pop culture is judged (Radosh tells a story of going to a concert wherein a teenager got excited because the band prayed three times during a twenty-minute set, for instance. As a veteran concert goer I can tell you that excitement would not by my reaction to that scenario) forces every last damn thing to have a cross on it. This is complete and total brand overkill, and that's a statement coming from a guy who owns two Roger Clyne & the Peacemakers t-shirts, an RCPM keychain/bottle opener, an RCPM necklace, and who totally wants the RCPM flask (and I don't even know what I'd do with a flask. Those things scream, "I'm a drunk on the go!" and that's not a message I necessarily want to send). The thing is, though, I own a lot of things that have nothing to do with Roger Clyne or his Peacemakers. Also, the crass commercialism of Christianity does something that RCPM's online store can't do: it creates a watered-down message and flirts with or jumps across the line of sacrilege. Sometimes with reckless abandon. Not only that, but the prime participants in the sacrilege are evangelical Christians themselves. Were I of a mind to take offense at such things these days, I think I would be less offended at some modern artist placing the cross in a jar of urine to "make a statement" than a herd of plaid-shirted tourists lumbering over to stare slack-jawed at and take digital pictures of the daily passion exhibition at the Holy Land Experience. I had a running conversation with a friend back at college (and since, I guess) that always went back to the question of what sort of person would actually want to buy the DVD of The Passion of the Christ so they could make popcorn and watch it on a Friday night. The sad thing is, we actually knew someone who counted it among her favorite movies, although to this day I couldn't tell you if it was because she actually liked it or because she thought that would be a relevant Facebook evangelization tool. I hated that movie when I was still a Christian and took it as a point of pride that I'd never seen it and wasn't intending to. It's weird. Back then I only saw it as odd, artless, and ultimately pointless. Now that I'm no longer religious, I see it as sacrilege. I think that removing myself from Christianity has given me far more respect for the religion than I ever had before. I think it's because the Christian pop culture doesn't respect its own symbols and does nothing to defend itself from kitsch and stupidity, instead believing that all of the Jesus junk, all the stupid trinkets, cheap rip-offs, and crappy sloganeering is useful or even good because it plants a seed. An oft-used passage from the New Testament is the story of the four soils. Jesus tells a parable about seeds, some of which fall on the road, some among the thorns, some in shallow soil, and some in rich soil. The ones in the road are carried off by birds, the ones in the thorns choked before they can grow, and the ones in the shallow soil can't take deep root. The ones in the good soil, of course, grow and give back a many-fold crop. The way this passage is often used is to basically blame the non-Christian for being a non-Christian. "We have these great seeds," it says, "So if the seeds don't take root it must be the fault of the soil." So, for instance, my personal lifestyle evangelizer gets to pat himself on the back for planting the seeds, shrug, and assume that if I don't come around its my own fault. I wonder if he'll ever understand that after twenty-odd years of trying my damnedest to be the good soil I eventually gave up. There's just nothing of value in the seeds of evangelical Christianity. And the planters are responding by making themselves even more irrelevant. Unfortunately, it also allows them a completely unwarranted feeling of superiority. The former doesn't bother me much, but the latter bugs me a whole lot. *While searching for the Amazon entry on Rapture Ready! I found a book called Oh, Shit! It's Jesus. Just thought I'd point that out. Don't consider this a recommendation, as I know nothing of the book except its name. Which is awesome. **I have a massive problem with this sticker and the elevator/fire warning from whence it was ripped off. Although it's technically grammatically allowed "In case of fire, use stairs" primarily says, "Never use the elevator just in case the building catches fire while you're in it." Saying "In the event of fire" would be much better.

Cultural Postmodernism

I’ve spent the last couple of years trying to understand postmodernity. It’s a pervasive issue these days and one that tends to get thrown around with reckless abandon. I’d heard all kinds of explanations for it, but they all sounded like a description, for lack of a better term, of symptoms, not the disease itself. You can only get so far with that. I would hear things like, “Postmoderns form communities,” “They want genuine interaction,” and “They are relativistic and don’t think in terms of absolutes.” This always seemed odd, as forming community and seeking genuine relationships was an integral aspect of human history as I’ve always understood it. I couldn’t wrap my mind around the idea of disregard for absolutes, either. Conversations with postmoderns almost always come down to some form of discussion of absolutes. A favorite band is the best ever and anyone who disagrees is a hopeless moron. The Republicans are completely evil fascists and the Democrats are the last bastion of freedom or the Democrats are baby killers and the Republicans are saints. It always sounded pretty absolute to me. If the desire to form genuine communities doesn’t define postmoderns and they don’t lack absolutes, there must be something else going on. Those “definitions” must be nothing more than symptoms. I started to feel like Dr. House yelling at his team to stop listing the problems and find an explanation that could explain them all. Then one day it all came together. A friend of mine was working on a B.S. paper for a somewhat misguided class on multiculturalism. We sat down to talk about the fact that I’m Norwegian. It became readily apparent that I don’t actually care about my Norwegian heritage, nor have I bothered to learn anything about it. After a while I started talking about history for reasons I don’t exactly remember. She gave me a kind of half amused look and said, “I’m doing the wrong paper. I should be writing about your culture as a historian.” A little later I made the comment, “Our culture is that which informs us of how we should look at the world.” It wasn’t until later that I realized I had answered my question about the roots of postmodernity. I had that one answer that explained all of the symptoms. The postmodern, as its name implies, came on the heels of modernity. Modernity, in turn, was ushered in with the advent of the scientific method. Before the modern was the primal. Societal formation during the three epochs varied, but it did so along cultural lines. The question of how culture is defined has not remained constant, however. During the primal era, cultural formation occurred along tribal lines. People, by and large, worshipped their particular tribal god, lived on tribal lands married within their tribal collective and basically spent their entire lives with people who looked, thought and acted like they did. During the modern era the tribal lines began to break down. Tribal gods gave way to the world religions. Tribal lands which had either expanded through conquest or been swallowed up by larger empires solidified in to arbitrary boundaries known as nation states. As the postmodern era those arbitrary boundaries are beginning to break down again because on some level people are realizing that they’ve been living in a culture that was imposed on them from an outside, artificial source. We are switching to a form of tribalism. But that tribalism has nothing to do with physical appearance or a particular god. It might be a political party or a band or a sports team or a particular city, but it’s still a tribal affiliation. All that’s happened is that the definition of what constitutes culture has changed. The internet has accelerated this process immensely. Pick any random idea and somebody has probably created a web forum for it with anywhere from a handful to thousands of fiercely enthusiastic members. They can meet and discuss and justify their particular culture at any time when not that long ago each individual person might have thought they were the only one in the world who thought that way. It used to be that we only thought of culture in terms of a half-dozen or so variables. There was race, ethnicity, religion, nationality, gender, language and possibly a couple others. Those traditional cultural lines have broken down, however. Races mix all the time, ethnicities are ignored by those who hold them and borrowed by others who want them, religious lines are crossed in the name of ecumenical understanding and so forth. As those lines blur or are erased entirely, something new has to show up to allow the self to be differentiated from the other. It is human nature to find an opposite, after all. Assuming this is right, I’m sure it will lead to a question of whether or not this is a good trend. I don’t think we can decide that yet. It is happening and cannot be stopped. We’ll have to wait for future historians to make those judgments…