Category Archives: Books

Books, Religion, Society

Raised Right: Slogans vs. Reality

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In chapter six of “Raised Right:  How I Untangled My Faith From Politics,” Alisa Harris describes her initial support of the Iraq War and how she came to question her faith in that war and her stance on war in general.  She describes one experience that served as a catalyst for the re-evaluation process:

But one day I popped in my grandmother’s big-band cassette tape and heard a song that pricked me with uneasiness.  A gunner fell and the sky pilot set aside his Bible and took up the gunner’s gun, singing, “Praise the Lord and pass the ammunition, and we’ll all stay free.”

I hit Fast Forward, scrambling the buoyant trumpets and brassy tune. it was all right to portray the long-suffering nobility of soldiers writing letters to their sweethearts and thinking of home or even the soldiers fretting about their girls sitting under the apple trees with other men.  But with this song I could see the gunner lying in pieces and the sky pilot using the phrase we all toss so casually — “Well, praise the Lord” — before he used the ammunition to rip a hole in a human being.

Prior to the above passage, Harris had described romantic notions of war and acknowledged in hindsight that they had been truly romantic.  However, this song struck her with a more bloody reality.  What seems to strike her however, is not only this bloody reality, but the casual way in which it is talked about and almost taken lightly by the flippant — at least as used in this context — phrase “Praise the Lord.”  She repeats her astonishment about such flippancy of a line uttered by Gary Cooper’s character in Sergeant York compares killing German soldiers in World War II to “shootin’ turkeys.”

As Harris faced the realities of war and the thought that war involves killing people — something generally condemned by the Christian god — she finds such casual talk about it to be troubling.  This forces her to consult with other people, both people in her lives and the great minds of people she respects as she grapples with this tough decision.

It’s this grappling with tough questions and the openness to being discomforted by such easy comments that interests me most in this chapter, because it’s something I think is too often lacking in conservative evangelical circles.[1]  Flippant phrases intended to simplify complex topics and therefore discourage uncomfortable thoughts over them are far too common.  They allow those who hear and repeat them to pass over a topic quite quickly and state a position without thinking abut the full implications of that position — especially for other people.

It’s only when those simplified phrases are shown in contrast to the much messier reality they seek to gloss over that such phrase’s flippancy becomes uncomfortably obvious.  Granted, not everyone responds to that discomfort as well as Harris did.  Rather than digging for deeper answers, some will simply dig their heels in harder and even become hostile to anyone who attempts to show them the deeper complexity of the topic and the horrible insensitivity of such simple catch-phrases.

In time, they might be able to cover up the discomfort again and stop thinking about the reality.  But one might hope that more such moments of discomfort might crop up, continuing to afflict the comfortable until they seek to comfort the afflicted.

Notes:
[1]  In fairness to the conservative evangelical Christians, it’s lacking in plenty of other circles as well, including some of the circles I belong to.

Books, Religion

TV pp.9-10: “Poor Sally”

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Note about page numbers:  I’m using an iBook copy of this book.  With iBook (and I believe most electronic books work this way), the book repaginates based on your font settings.  As such, I’m not sure how useful it will be to give page numbers.  For anyone who wants to know, I’m reading my iPad in portrait mode using the smallest font size, with a font setting of Palatino.  That’s how I come by the page numbers I list in the post titles.

Having met our mysterious crucifixion survivor and watching his discovering of some unknown power last week, we turn the first chapter of Peretti’s “The Visitation” this week to meet nineteen year old Sally Fordyce as she leaves her home in Antioch Washington[1] to go for a walk.  We learn that Sally is nineteen and has returned to Antioch to live with her parents after a short-lived relationship with a trucker named Joey.  Peretti describes that relationship from Sally’s point of view:

She had believed everything Joey, the trucker, told her about love, and how she was that girl silhouetted on his mud flaps.  The marriage — if it happened at all — lasted three months.  When he found another woman more “intellectually stimulating,” Sally was bumped from the truck’s sleeper and found herself coming full circle, right back to bring Charlie and Meg’s daughter living at home again.

This is the perfect evangelical cautionary tale against “fast relationships,” especially those involving premarital sex.  Sally is that “poor girl” who trusted the promises of the “wrong boy,” fell head over heels, got used, and had her heart broken and dumped back home, ruined.

As anyone who has ever dated can tell you, there’s a lot of truth to this story.  I suspect most of us could tell that story of that person who promised us the world and eternal love, believed them, and ended up getting hurt.  I don’t take issue with any particular detail of this story, as it’s quite plausible.

And yet, the way in which this tale is told and meant to be perceived in evangelical circles is troubling to me.  This is not a tale of a young woman who had her heart broken when love didn’t work out, but the tale of the foolish girl who made a lot of bad choices and got the heartbreak coming to her.  Let me break down some of the hidden (or maybe not-so-hidden) elements of this message.

First, we have Joey comparing Sally to silhouettes (presumably of a sexy woman in some pose that’s meant to be provocative) on the mud flaps of his truck.  In evangelical culture, this is a hint that Joey is a sex-obsessed boy who would seek to sexually objectify any woman he meets.  In the evangelical mindset, this is probably seen as a sure sign that Joey watches porn too, and that if Sally had been smarter, she would’ve realized that Joey was bad news and only interested in one thing where she was concerned.

Add to this the phrase “if it happened at all” in regard to the marriage, which suggests that maybe Joey and Sally didn’t officially tie the knot, but instead were simply cohabitating in Joey’s truck as the traveled around for his work.  Again, this is a clear warning sign in evangelical circles, as any guy who will shack up with a girl without “making her an honest woman” is bound to dump her at some point.  Again, to the evangelical mind, this is something that Sally should have seen as a sign that Joey was trouble and avoided him.

The thing is, this is how some evangelicals tend to envision all relationships that meet their expectations of “doing marriage right” look.  There are no well-meaning couples who decide to live together and do their best to make things work, only to fail.  If such a relationship fails, it’s because the couple “did it wrong.”  Even if the couple does everything “right” according to the culture, if the relationship fails, it’s a sign they “didn’t really do it right after all.”  And while they might be sympathetic with Sally, there’s that part that sees this as consequences she brought on herself.

This is further shown as Peretti tells us that Sally saw her relationship with Joey as her chance for freedom.  Of course, Sally’s understanding of freedom is painted as immature.  Now that she’s back home, she has to cook, clean, and help with other household chores, things that she apparently didn’t have to do while living with Joey.

Of course, to Sally, freedom also meant escape from the small town of Antioch.  To her, Joey was her one chance to escape.  I find this interesting because Peretti is playing on a cliche here that I don’t buy into.  Contrary to popular belief, not everyone who grows up in small towns wants to escape them.  Even some of those who are not “wheat farmers” decide they like their cozy little hometown and stick around.  After all, there’s a lot to be said for living in a small community where everyone has known almost everyone else since they were born.  It can be quite comfortable.

Yes, some of us[2] decide we’d prefer more excitement.  Or we decide that our chosen careers require us to move.  Or we decide we’d have better dating options in a larger, more diverse community.  But we don’t necessarily just leave our small towns for the sake of escaping our small towns.

This is, I suppose, where I find Sally a bit poorly written.  There is nothing driving her desire to get out of Antioch.  There is nothing pushing her away from her hometown, nor is there anything pulling her to some new location.

Of course, that’s why Sally never found an escape other than Joey.  She has no ambition of her own.  She has no goals or self-determined destination.  And that’s why she is still (or at least back) in Antioch.  So she latches onto a man — a trucker who tells her that she’s sexy and beautiful, no less — to provide her with her escape.

Elephant in the room time:  Don’t a lot of evangelicals hold this up as a woman’s perfect — and only — duty?  Isn’t being a wife beholden to a particular man part and parcel of many evangelical descriptions of the ideal woman.  So here we have Sally, who seems to be latching onto that idea herself.  She turned to a man to be her ticket to the good life.  And yet, because (1) she didn’t “do it right” and (2) she “failed,” she’s a “poor girl” to be pitied/tsk-tsked by the same people who probably contributed to her thinking that this was the perfect life for her.

After all this set up, Sally meets a random stranger that has a message for her:

“I’m here to bring you a message.  Your prayers have been answered, Sally.  Your answer is on his way.  Be looking for him.”

Sally’s answer to her prayers — her prayers to get out of this small town — is on his way.  You heard that, the alleged answers to her prayers is another man.

You can almost hear the evangelical readers sardonically thinking, “Here we go again.”

Notes:
[1]  Google maps knows of no Antioch in Washington, though there apparently is a “Highway 9” that runs through that state.  I suspect that this is another attempt by Peretti to create a plausible sounding small town, as Yamikuronue concludes about Ashtion in “This Present Darkness.”

[2]  I grew up in the rural town of Tioga, Pennsylvania, so I’m a “small town boy” myself.

Books, Gender and Sexuality

Women in Harlequin’s “Destiny”

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This weekend, I finished reading the first book in Harlequin’s “Rogue Angel” book series, “Destiny.”  Overall, I enjoyed it, as I love stories about strong women.  I’m looking forward to reading about more of Annja Creed’s adventures.

About halfway through the book, I also came across Ana Mardoll’s Slacktiverse contribution in which she discusses the Bechdel Test.  Out of curiosity, I decided to consider how “Destiny” would fare.[1]   Besides Annja, I can readily find only one other female character in the book: a server at the restaurant Annja and Roux eat at after their first adventure together.  As it turns out, the two women have a brief conversation in which Annja verifies that her dining companion — a man — has run out, leaving her to pay the bill.  That conversation fails the test at point three.  Fortunately, Maria, the head chef in a small Cuban restaurant in New York, shows up in Chapter 19 to have a conversation with Annja.  Even though the conversation eventually turns to the young male cop Annja is about to meet, I’m willing to accept the fact that they spend about half a page talking about Annja’s time out of the country first as a sign of passing the test.  I will note, however, that it took nineteen chapters (roughly 137 pages and half the book) to not only pass the test, but to introduce the third female character.

Now, I can certainly understand why many of the other main characters are men.  It makes sense that Roux and Garin would both be men, given their backstories.  I can also understand why the monks in the story are men.  I’ll even grant that having Lesauvage be a man makes sense, given his love for the myth The Wild Hunt.[2]

However, there were a number of characters — shopkeepers, restaurant staff, security guards, and police, that were either clearly marked as men or whose gender was never indicated.  It would have been quite easy to add more characters.  For that matter, it would have been easy to have Annja have the conversation that occurs upon her return to the bed and breakfast with Camille Lambert instead of her husband, Francois.  Camille is one of the women who are mentioned in the story, but never actually get to see in action and whose voice we never hear.

Another woman who was mentioned was Bart’s girlfriend, who is not even named.  Personally, I found the mention of this girlfriend somewhat troubling, as the main purpose for mentioning her seemed to in order for Annja to feel jealous, and a rather strange sort of jealousy at that:

Annja didn’t like the little ember of jealousy inside her.  She knew she didn’t want commitment at this point in her life, but she’d iced the idea of having Bart kind of waiting in the wings.  She didn’t like how casually that had just been taken off the table.  Or how she’d made the wrong assumptions about his feelings for her.  She felt foolish.

I’m a bit disturbed by this whole depiction of Annja as someone who doesn’t really want this guy, but wants him to want her.  I will be honest that I’m particularly disturbed as the book is written by a man.[3]  As such, I find myself wondering if this is some thinly veiled “look at the games women play” misogynistic nonsense.

Even more troubling than Bart’s unnamed girlfriend and Annja’s reaction to learning of her existence is the references to Kristie Chatham, who is introduced as another woman who does segments for the show, “Chasing History’s Monsters.”  We learn quickly that Kristie has a number of outtakes (which made it on air) where her bikini fell off.  The narrator lets us know quite clearly what Annja thinks of Kristie:

For her [Kristie], history never went past her last drink and her last lover.

There you have it.  Annja not-so-secretly thinks that the other woman is nothing more than an unintellectual slut and lush.  Those are pretty harsh thoughts.

Of course, it’s not just Annja who seems to feel that way.  Whenever the show comes up, the other characters — invariably[4] men — immediately mention the “woman with the wardrobe problem,” and reassure Annja that she’s much more intelligent and sensible than that.  It seems as though Annja’s impressive intelligence and strength cannot be appreciated unless it’s compared to some other woman’s alleged failings.  That strikes me as deeply troubling.

Like I said, I liked this book.  And overall, I like the fact that it features a strong woman who can fight like a great warrior and has great intelligence and no small education.  However, that does not mean that there are not troubling aspects about this book and its portrayal of women in general and even some of Annja’s own characteristics (like her attitudes towards some other women).  I find myself concerned about the messages the book might send or reinforce.  I’d be interested to hear what my female readers think of the book (if any of you have read it) and/or my thoughts on it.

Notes:
[1]  I understand that traditionally, the test is applied to movies and television shows, but I see no reason why it shouldn’t be applied to books as well.  After all, books have characters (in some cases, more of them than you’re average movie) and dialogue.  So I say it’s fair game until someone gives me a good reason why it shouldn’t be.

[2]  This does not, however, explain why all of his cult members were men.  Some of them could have been women, unless Lesauvage was being intentionally portrayed as misogynistic.  However, the author made no attempt to establish that trait for that character, and I”m not inclined to just to give the author the benefit of the doubt.

[3]  A little research told me that the name that appears on the books is a house name used for the series and that this particular book was written by a man named Victor Milan.

[4]  Take that with a grain of salt.   I admit that I’ve had to revise many statements I originally made about the book as I continued to thumb through my copy to find the details I planned on using in this post.  Originally, I couldn’t remember any female characters being in the book besides Annja, just other women being mentioned by male characters.

Books, Politics, Religion, Society

Raised Right: Patriotism and Idolatry

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Rather than moving on to chapter six of Alisa Harris’s book, “Raised Right:  How I Untangled my Faith from Politics,” I’ve decided to remain in chapter five.  In last Monday’s post, I mainly focused on Harris’s attention on repentance (for others) and the need for Divine wrath to bring it about.  This week, I want to look at the underlying motivation for this desire for nation-wide repentance, which Harris also covers.

Ultimately, when 9/11 struck, the conservative Christians like Harris were hoping for a return to God by the whole nation.  The idea here is that they want to reclaim America’s place as the great Christian nation it was intended to be.[1]  To them, they want to create the great Christian America, which they assume will be the apple of God’s eye, much like Israel was the apple of God’s eye throughout the New Testament.[2]  So pulling down the separation of Church and State and pushing the supremacy of their version of Christianity is essential to establishing their version of God’s kingdom.

Years ago, I wrote on another (now defunct) blog that I felt that American evangelical’s desires to remake America into a Christian Nation struck me as a modern day golden calf.  In their efforts to bring this about, they have ignored the teachings of Christ and the methods for Kingdom-building that he and his apostles promoted throughout the New Testament.  It seems that in this regard, I have found a kindred spirit in Alisa Harris.  Harris even notes that this particular idolatry isn’t new:

Before American democracy became the form of government Christians favored, medieval Christians believed God favored the right of a king to rule over his people, protecting them in return for their allegiance and service.  The Puritan founder of Massachusetts, John Winthrop, didn’t believe we were all equals but that “God Almighty” had made “some … rich, some poor, some high and eminent in power and dignity, other mean and in subjection.  He and his fellow leaders thought a truly godly commonwealth should drive out Quakers, Catholics, Baptists, dissenters, questioners. … Christians today say the Bible endorses capitalism; Christians two hundred years ago said it endorsed the divine right of kings.  Both missed the point, which is that the Bible is neither an eighteenth- nor a twenty-first-century policy textbook.  It endorses neither the fiefdom nor the global superpower.  America is not a “uniquely Christian” nation, and it never was.

That last statement touches upon the biggest condemnation of the Religious Right’s idolization of America:  They forget that there are other Christians and Christian majorities in the world.  They forget that the Christians in India or Egypt trying to live godly lives deserve as much dignity and respect as their American counterparts.  In focusing on the Great Christian Nation, it seems to me that many American evangelicals have put themselves above their brothers and sisters in other parts of the world.

Notes:
[1]  Of course, this whole idea is based on the faulty claims of people like David Barton, who seek to prove that America was founded with the intention of making it a Christian nation at all, and particularly the brand of Christianity the Religious Right endorses.

[2]  This is one of the bizarre thing about the relationship between American evangelicals and Israel.  On the one hand, American evangelicals talk about Israel’s status as “God’s chosen people.”  Yet, on the other hand, they see themselves as Israel’s replacement in that official capacity.

Books, Religion

TV p. 8: Power vs. Power

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Note about page numbers:  I’m using an iBook copy of this book.  With iBook (and I believe most electronic books work this way), the book repaginates based on your font settings.  As such, I’m not sure how useful it will be to give page numbers.  For anyone who wants to know, I’m reading my iPad in portrait mode using the smallest font size, with a font setting of Palatino.  That’s how I come by the page numbers I list in the post titles.

Peretti starts “The Visitation” with a very short prologue.[1]  This prologue starts out describing what one might first think of as the crucifixion of Jesus himself.  Peretti describes the ringing of hammer against nail and the crunching of bone beneath said nail.  He then describes the young man as he hangs there beneath the scorching sun.

He cried out, but God did not listen.  It could have been God who drove the nails, then put his hammer down and turned away, smiling in victory.  It could have been God who left him to bake and bleed in the sun, unable to stand, unable to fall, as the sun marked the passing hours across the cloudless sky.

We can glean from this passage that the young man is likely from a religious background.  Contrary to what the “non-Christians hate Jesus crowd” might thing, the nonreligious – especially those who were nonreligious from the day they were born – do not face adversity and think that God has abandoned them, let alone that God is the likely cause of their adversity.

No, a young man has to believe in God – or at least be brought up to believe in God – to believe that it was God Himself who crucified him.

This is confirmed as the young man reflects on the accusations of his tormentors:

“You’re a child of the devil,” they said.  A child of the devil who needed to be contained.

So the people who crucified this young man are devoutly religious and believe they are authorized – presumably by God Himself – to determine who is God’s own chosen and who is a child of the devil.  Not only that, they feel duly authorized to do what must be done to “contain” those who fall into the latter category, even if it means crucifying that person and leaving zir for dead in the scorching heat.

When I volunteered at a summer day camp for Child Evangelism Fellowship, the leaders always cautioned us to choose our words carefully when disciplining the children in our care.  They warned us that we should refrain from telling a child that zie is “bad.”  The leaders explained that this often created a self-reinforcing message to the child, which would just as likely result in more bad behavior than encouraging good behavior.  We were encouraged to point out that the child was precious and valuable, and even good, but was engaging in bad behavior.  Bad behavior by good children was correctable after all.  What’s more, it made it worth correcting the good behavior.

If I had ever told a child that they were the spawn of Satan himself, I suspect that the CEF leadership would have asked me to leave and never come back.  Had I ever told a child such a thing while driving nails into their wrist so they could hang their in agony while dying, I should hope they would have called the police on me.

What has happened to this young man is monstrous beyond measure.  Not only has he been involved in a religious group that feels justified in declaring him irredeemably evil, but they have placed final judgment on him on God’s behalf, leaving him to die in misery.  This young man, whoever he is deserves our sympathy.  He deserves our compassion.  He deserves mercy and relief from his torment.

I find that interesting that as the prologue continues, the young man finds relief from his torment, but without any mention of mercy:

He cried out once again, and this time, a voice, a mind, answered and a power coursed through him.  Suddenly, he could bear the pain and make it fuel for his will.  With burning will, he determined he would live.

Power.  He does not find mercy, but power.  Power to survive according to his own will.  Power provided by some unknown source.

Of course, he has already had one brush with power.  Those who hung him by nails that tore through his flesh and bone and left him to die had power to.  They used their power to abuse and hurt him.  To them, power was something to torment and “contain” those they deemed unfit for life.

So one might wonder, how one who has been abused by the powerful might react when he finds not saving mercy from others, but power to save himself.  Power that he now can wield.  One might wonder what he might do with that power, power that still knows nothing of mercy.

Whether this young man becomes a just protagonist or a monster modeled after his own tormentors and the brutal lessons they taught him, this moment makes him a rather sympathetic character in my eyes.

Notes:
[1]  Actually, there is an introduction before the prologue.  However, given that the introduction is a brief discussion of his own thoughts, I chose to skip over them and move right into the fictional narrative.

Books, Religion

Raised Right: Repentance and Patriotism

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In chapter five of “Raised Right:  How I Untangled my Faith from Politics,” Alisa Harris shares her memories and thoughts from 9/11.  She speaks of it as a time of revived patriotism as well as a time when she hoped for a nation-wide revival and repentance.  Her link between patriotism and repentance struck me in this chapter.

While Harris might not have directly blamed 9/11 or any other disaster on QUILTBAG people, feminists, liberals, or any other perceived “enemies of God,” you can see the same mentality here.  While not (explicitly) pinpointing a particular group, she still thought of the national tragedy as god’s divine wrath and a warning call to repentance.

Harris explains that during the time immediately after 9/11, her mind began to compare America’s tragedy to the Old Testament description of the Israelites:

The world had shifted in a way I’d only read abut in the oldest of the Bible’s sacred books.  Although ancient Israel backslid, worshipped false gods, sacrificed its children, and neglected the tabernacle where God resided, God never abandoned His beloved.  Judgment came, the Israelites in their misery repented, and God always welcomed them back with a heart that forgave again and again.  I believed America, the new Israel, was stuck in the same relentless cycle: we backslid, sacrificed to the false gods of Hollywood and big government, murdered our children, and forsook the sacrifice of obedience;; but surely repentance and redemption and revival would come before it was too late.

What’s interesting to me — and something that she alludes to in other places — is that her list of America’s sins (or Israel’s for that matter) does not mention the neglect of the widow or orphan, taking advantage of those already impoverished and downtrodden.

At the time, Harris’s dream was of this leading to a revival.  She describes how she envisioned it:

I pictured revival beginning with a twenty-first century Jonathan Edwards in a small church in a tiny town waking up one day and being moved by God to preach an unusual message.  He would approach his pulpit that Sunday, look out at the soft sinners sitting in the pews, and then launch into a modern version of “Sinners of an Angry God” – a tale of woe, of damnation, of sinners being dangle over the mouth of hell by an outraged deity.  That same hand would clutch the hearts of the people who sat rapt in the pews.

I remember reading (or at least skimming) “Sinners in the Hands of an Angry God” in high school.   It’s the model “fire and brimstone” sermon, and for good reason.  The fact that Harris and her former colleagues and co-religionists consider this sermon as the model for renewal and revival tells us a great deal about fundamentalist thought and the god they worship.

Understand that Harris is making it clear that in her early life, she soundly believed (and I suspect this is common amongst fundamentalists and other staunchly conservative Christians) is that revival and a return to God must be sparked by a fear of that same god and his almighty wrath.  Not can.  Not might.  Must.

This strikes me as an admission that the god of such people has nothing sufficiently positive or attractive with which to woo the wayward nonbeliever.[1]  Blessing will not woo the nonbeliever.[2]  Instead, they must be frightened into the grace of God by his wrathful judgment and doom.

Is it any wonder most of their evangelistic efforts fail?  There are reasons you don’t see more commercials that amount to “buy our product or we’ll beat you senseless.”

Of course, it’s important to note that Harris and those she worshipped with did not see 9/11 as a call for them to repent.  In their minds, that call was directed at others, which left those who were sending out that call on God’s behalf quite comfortable.

And that was her picture of patriotism at the time:  Telling others to shape up and get back in line.  I suspect that she might use a different term to describe that mentality now.  I certainly do.

Notes:
[1]  Remind me some day to do a post on why I despise the word nonbeliever.

[2]  Not surprising, since Jesus himself admits that God causes the sun to shine and the rain to shine on the righteous and the wicked alike.  Of course, I doubt most fundamentalists read that verse, and certainly not in context.  It’s a continuation of verse 44, which is the start of Jesus’s exhortation to love one’s enemies.  In context, verse 45 suggests that even God loves His enemies, which might conflict with all that wrath some of His followers is waiting for him to pour out.

Books, Memories, Meta-Blogging, Religion

Considering Peretti books for analysis

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After some thought, I’ve decided that I’m going to do a deconstruction — if you can still call it a deconstruction if you find more about the book that you like than you dislike — of another book by Frank Peretti.

I’ve read a total of five Peretti books.  Each one of them is slightly different in some way.  This Present Darkness is about the war between angels and demons as it plays out in a small town.  Piercing the Darkness, its sequel, is also about angels battling demons, but this time the main focus is the battle over a particular soul (though it did have a swipe at the public education system, which was a popular topic at the time I was reading it due tot he emergence of outcomes based education).

The third book that I read was Prophet, which was not about angels and demons but about a journalist who found himself living a “prophetic” (in the terms of warning others of the consequences of their misdeeds) vocation.  The book mostly focused on the evils of the (liberal, of course) media and abortion.

The fourth book that I read was The Oath.  It was a strange book in that it was far more a Horror book than the others.  While it got preachy about the nature of sin, there was also no clear connections to actual spiritual movements (at least not that I’m aware of) like the first three were.  I often joked that The Oath seemed more like Peretti contracted Stephen King to write a book for him in comparison to the others I had read.

I should note that I read these four books when I was in high school, when I still considered myself a fundamentalist Christian.  As such, I read them as a member of Peretti’s target audience.

I didn’t read my fifth book, The Visitation until I was in my late twenties or early thirties, long after I became a witch and devotee of Freyja.  In many ways, I suppose that’s why i liked the book.  In this book, Peretti turned his critical eye away from “outsiders” and turned it upon his own religious subculture.  As a former member of that same subculture, I appreciated his look.

I’ve decided that I want to do an in-depth analysis of The Visitation.  As I said, I’m not sure I can call it a deconstruction, as many of the parts that I will be exploring are places where I actually identify and agree with Peretti’s thoughts.  However, given the nature of the main plot, which I wasn’t as impressed with, I don’t expect my comments to be entirely glowing, either.

I’m also hoping that it might be interesting to compare this book with This Present Darkness.  Who knows, maybe it’ll even spark up some sort of discussion between Yamikuronue and myself as we compare our experiences of our respective Peretti books.

Around The Blogosphere, Books, Religion

Great deconstruction

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I’ve been fascinated by Fred Clark’s deconstruction of the Left Behind series since I first came into contact with it.  It’s one of the reasons I’ve been reviewing Alisa Harris’s book chapter by chapter.  I have also been considering tackling a more thorough reconstruction of another book.  The book that kept coming back to me was Frank Peretti’s This Present Darkness, which I originally read while I was in late elementary school (approximately fifth or sixth grade).

While This Present Darkness is nearly three decades old, I think it’s still relevant in that it has shaped and still expresses many of the ideas central to those Christians who are members of the spiritual warfare movement.  As I spent time involved in that movement, attacking this book made a lot of sense.

Yesterday, however, I discovered that a fellow Slacktivite, a woman who goes by the name of yamikuronue on her blog, began deconstructing Peretti’s book back in September.  I read through the entirety of her deconstruction so far (thankfully, she’s only fifty pages into it) and found it to be fascinating and remarkable.

From what I’ve gathered reading yamikuronue’s blog, she was never a member of the spiritual warfare movement herself.  In many ways, I think this is proving to be an asset to her deconstruction.  I’ve looked at a lot of things that she covers and realized that I probably would have taken them for granted and glossed over them.  To give you an example of that, consider the following excerpt from her post dated 22 October:

The man has serious issues with anger management and victim-blaming;
why complacency as his major sin? Complacency goes with despair
certainly – “I can’t fix anything, so why bother” – but that means the
entire bit of irrational anger was all his own doing, with absolutely no
infernal aid. Marshall is an abusive man without the demonic
intervention; all the demon was doing was encouraging him to stop trying
to be less abusive. And this is meant to be our hero?

Understanding how spiritual warfare types often see anger, I would have glossed over this excellent point, whereas yamikuronue focuses on it quite well.  As such, I think she is doing a far better job at deconstructing the books than I would have.

So instead of doing my own deconstruction, I’m going to follow along with hers and offer my comments.  I still have a lot to offer, such as how the things she is deconstructing ties into the greater spiritual warfare mindset and the community that subscribes to it.  I would encourage my readers to follow along as  well.

And I’ll find another book to tackle when the time comes.

Books, Politics, Religion

Raised Right: Idolizing mortals

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In chapter four of Raised Right:  How I Untangle my Faith from Politics, Alisa Harris talks about her childhood obsession with and idolization of Ronald Reagan.  Of course, Harris’s obsession with Reagan was not limited to herself.  She describes the phenomenon among conservative evangelicals as follows:

Some children revere saints.  In the conservative circles of my childhood, we had heroes — not suffering martyrs who sacrificed for their faith but conquerors who crushed the enemies of God with truth and justice.  These conquerors had to be Christians, preferably of humble roots and always of stainless character, who overcame their enemies to accomplish deeds that changed the world.  We read glowing heroic accounts that omitted Thomas Jefferson’s deism, Louisa May Alcott’s transcendentalism, and Christopher Columbus’s avarice.

Harris’s comparison between the martyrs idolized by other Christians and the “conquerors” of some conservatives is well worth noting, as both the Bible and Jesus[1] seem pretty obvious supporters of the former model rather than the latter.  Without explicitly doing so, Harris seems to at least imply that this conqueror-veneration represents a deviation from more traditional Christian philosophy.  This is further strengthened when she describes her rather curious re-interpretation of Jesus’s words in Luke 4:18 at that time in her life:

When I heard “freedom,” I thought “deregulation of onerous government rules”; when I heard “bind,” I thought “bind to the virtue of limited government”; when I heard “oppressed,” I thought of children who were not allowed to pray in school and successful rich people whose money was seized by the government.  I would whisper, “It is for freedom that Christ set us free,” and would think, Freedom to display the Ten Commandments in a public place!

It’s also noteworthy that Harris’s heroes — and the heroes of those around her — had to be whitewashed to appear blameless and perfect in order to be accept.  Conservative heroes could not and cannot be “sinners bought by grace,” but at least had to be practically sinless.[2]  She gives the example of Irving Berlin, who made her uncomfortable with his “coarse jesting” about having sex on his honeymoon.[3]

I suppose this explains why conservative Christians are so slow to acknowledge when their great leaders “fall” in scandals.  They’ve allowed themselves to build up this idea that they are heroes and so perfect — something necessary to consider them great leaders — that acknowledging those instances where their leaders reveal their “feet of clay” and falter means admitting that they invested in the wrong person.  In a sense, their leaders’ failings are echoed in their own failings in “backing the wrong person.”

Harris closes out the chapter in describing her time at a Decemberists concert after Obama’s election victory.  She describes the crowd cheering on Obama’s success and his promises of change, being encouraged and whipped up by the musicians on stage.  Harris compares this Obamamania to her childhood idolization of Reagan.  I’m inclined to disagree with Harris’s comparison here, or at least as universal as she seems to paint it.  While I have no doubt that some liberals got caught up in a blind belief in Obama — and are possibly still caught up in it — most of my fellow liberals were and are well aware that Obama is just another human being, as mistake-prone and imperfect as any of us.  In my experience, liberals are able to be both supportive of our leaders and critical of them at the same time.

Notes:
[1]  The post-millennial dispensationalist version of “Turbo-Jesus” notwithstanding.

[2]  Of course, I suspect this was only true for certain values of “sin.”  For example, it doesn’t seem that conservatives were or are that concerned with whether their heroes show any signs of that great abomination, pride.

[3]  The conservative Christian treatment of sex, even when it’s in the “sacred confines of marriage,” deserves its own blog post.  Perhaps several.  I will note, however, that Harris lists Berlin’s jokes about sex with his new bride was mentioned even before the fact that he was Jewish rather than Christian, suggesting that the former was a more troubling matter than the latter.

Books, Religion

Raised Right: Argument Without Engagement

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In chapter three of Raised Right, Alisa Harris explores the confrontational approach  to both politics and evangelism she was taught in her youth:

Like Socrates I was a gadfly – always provoking, stinging citizens out of complacency, and melodramatically drinking the hemlock they forced on me in punishment.

I remember this mentality growing up.  The idea of remaining silent on any issue deemed important by certain Christian leaders was unthinkable.  The evil of the day — abortion, homosexuality, moral relativism, and the New Age movement all had to be soundly and unequivocally renounced at every opportunity.  (And sometimes, like Harris’s description of the county fair, it was up to us to create such an opportunity.)

And like Harris, I remember how those people who took issue with the heavy-handed tactics I learned were to be considered proof that I was doing the right thing.  After all, the BIble said that those of us who followed Jesus were sure to offend people.  So I had the perfect excuse to see reasonable criticism of my aggressive posture as mere rejection of the Truth I was proclaiming.[1]  In effect, I was set up to be obnoxious and see myself as a martyr.

Harris goes on to talk about the Four Killer questions that one of her evangelism mentors taught her and her peers to use:

  • What do you mean by that?
  • How do you know what you are saying is true?
  • What difference does it make in your life?
  • What if you are wrong and you die?

These were not questions I was taught to use.  I was taught standard arguments to use on different topics and techniques to force the conversation along a certain path.  Both approaches are based on the idea that what the evangelistic or political target actually thinks or believes isn’t important as in forcing the conversation int he direction you want it to go.

Harris describes the superbly beautiful way in which the Four Killer Questions not only accomplish their goal, but make themselves the ultimate universal approach to winning any argument:

This approach didn’t require you to refute, or even know, the tenets of Marxism or socialism or secular humanism because you strictly limited your conversation to asking these four simple questions again and again. If the Marxist responded with the same questions, you shot back, “What kind of evidence would you accept as proof?”  Since wed learned that his objections weren’t serious or even intellectually honest, that they were grounded in nothing but a stubborn blindness to truth, the Marxist could give just one honest answer:  “None.”

Of course, anyone who has been on the receiving end of the Four Killer Questions[2] or similar debate tactics could tell you, the most likely reaction to being thus heckled[3] is frustration, anger, and returned hostility rather than conversion.  In addition to the promise of “martyrdom for truth,” Harris’s mentors offered the perfect way to assuage any concerns about the ineffectiveness of the approach:

The Four Killer Questions brought the godless to Christ – later.  Those Four Killer Questions would gnaw away at the girl from Planned Parenthood or the guy with the dreads, eroding their faith in their worldview until someone else dropped along with the gospel message…

This is a convenient out, as it allows the person to imagine the “effectiveness” of their obnoxious behavior appearing out of their own sight, beyond their ability to objectively – or even subjectively – measure them.  In a way, it creates a fantasy where one’s “evangelistic efforts” are completely detached from not only the people being evangelized, but from any sort of results.

I’ve occasionally commented on the Former Conservative’s posts criticizing some evangelists’ approaches pointing out that “saving souls” is not nearly as important as “preaching the message” and that to such people, “evangelism” is an act of piety rather than an honest attempt at persuasion.  I think that in this chapter, Harris demonstrates not only the truth of that statement, but the ways in which such evangelicals rationalize the transition from the latter intuit the former, or at least the conflation of the two.

Notes:
[1]  In fairness, some evangelicals do try to combat this notion.  For example, in college, the volunteer staffworker that InterVarsity Christian Fellowship assigned to my campus’s chapter often said, “The Bible may offend some, but that’s no excuse for presenting its message offensively.”  This isn’t to say her presentation of Biblical truth was always the best it could be, but at least she tried to make it clear that “being as harsh as possible as long as you’re convinced you’re right” was not an acceptable approach.

[2]  Harris provides a perfect anecdote that shows what I imagine would be a fairly typical reaction.

[3]  I think this is a far proper term to describe the intent and effects of this approach rather than “challenged” or “debated.”  Both of those terms suggest actual engagement with the substance of one’s positions.