Category Archives: Religion

Books, Religion

Raised Right: Empathy and Judgment

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With today’s post, I want to take a look at chapter 8 of Alisa Harris’s book, “Raised Right:  How I Untangled my Faith from Politics.”  Ms. Harris selected “Judge Not” for the chapter’s title, almost certainly to bring up Jesus’s own injunction against judging as retold in Matthew 7.  I think that the entirety of Matthew 7:1-5[1] is relevant to both the theme of chapter 7 of Ms. Harris’s book and her approach to it, so I’d like to quote it here:

“Judge not, that you be not judged. For with what judgment you judge, you will be judged; and with the measure you use, it will be measured back to you.  And why do you look at the speck in your brother’s eye, but do not consider the plank in your own eye?  Or how can you say to your brother, ‘Let me remove the speck from your eye’; and look, a plank is in your own eye?  Hypocrite! First remove the plank from your own eye, and then you will see clearly to remove the speck from your brother’s eye.

This passage does not end with simply saying, “Don’t judge.”  It goes on to explain that whatever standard you choose to pick up and judge others with is likely to be the same standard that others turn around and judge you on.  If you nit-pick others’ every actions, pointing out every thing you consider to be wrong, people are likely to scour your own behavior for things to criticize.  If you tend to be be more lax and easy-going, others are more likely to cut you some slack too.

Ms. Harris appears to apply this as she goes from telling her story about discovering with disbelief that some of her Christians friends are Democrats to recalling her own experiences promoting feminism and being criticized and even attacked by other Christians[3].  She describes how her promotion of feminist thought[4] and the slack both she and her employer at the time — a Christian publication — took a great deal of flak, and how it caused her to soften her own views on how other evangelicals might approach certain political ideas differently than she did.  Her empathy enabled her to realize things are not always as stark and simplistic as one might first believe, and that a more nuanced understanding of the complexities of reality may lead rational people to complex positions that differ greatly.

I found myself more willing to believe thatpeople can hold blends of belief that seem incongruous to someone else.  I could be a Christian and a feminist; someone else could be a Christian and a Democrat.

Is it any wonder that to those who want to continue seeing the world in simple terms of black and white, this kind of empathy is dangerous enough to be decried as heresy?

Notes:
[1]  As an aside, while looking up this passage, I noted that it comes immediately after the “don’t worry about what tomorrow will bring” passage and is immediately followed by  the whole “ask and you shall receive” passage and a variant on Golden Rule.[2]     It seems to me that Jesus really could’ve titled the whole sermon something like “Silly thing that everyone does that creates more stress and problems for themselves and others.”

[2]  In reality, I think Jesus’s “judge not” passage is actually a specialized application of/corollary to the Golden Rule anyway, which I hope comes out in the rest of this blog post.

[3]  Not surprisingly, many of the fellow Christians who attacked her were men.

[4]  I want to wait until next week to delve more deeply into Ms. Harris’s feminism, the response she received from her fellow evangelicals, and possibly even how it might have affected her.  I feel it deserves attention in its own right.  Plus, I’d like to offer a blogging buddy an invitation to share her insights on the topic.

Gender and Sexuality, Religion

But I hate supporting the patriarchy![1]

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I’ve had a few ideas for a post running around in my head for a few days now.  I want to explore how gender is treated in modern Paganism, how a binary view of gender[2] influences Paganism (most notably Wicca and those traditions closely related to it), and whether it’s a good or bad thing.  However, that post is nowhere near ready to go up.  However, thinking about the topic brought up a recent memory that I’d like to reflect on.

Earlier this year, Z. Budapest came to our town and held a tarot workshop at Psychic’s Thyme, in which each woman in attendance received a personal reading from Ms. Budapest.  The event was well attended and from all reports I’ve heard, it was a great success.

As the event approached, I had many customers at the shop ask me if I was planning to attend.  I’d simply smile and point out that I would not be attending, as the workshop was for women only, and express hope that they would have a good time at the workshop.

Apparently, during the workshop, one of the women decided to ask Ms. Budapest why she had made the event women only.  She started her reply by explaining that this was a special event intended to strengthen and nurture women, and that part of that was giving them a special place free with men.  I’m totally on board with her on all of those points.  While I certainly would have enjoyed to meet and learn from someone as experienced and renowned as Ms. Budapest, I agree that — especially in our patriarchal society that tends to devalue and marginalize women — it makes perfect sense to say, “some things are just for the women because they deserve it.”

The ending of her explanation was a bit more problematic to me.  Part of her argument was that men already have a “special place” that caters to them.  She went on to say that the place in question is known as the Vatican.

As I said, I have no problem with women-only events and spaces.  In fact, I highly approve of them.  However, I do take issue with the suggestion — even if done in jest — that as a man, I have my own space within the Catholic church.

The first — somewhat obvious in my opinion — with that suggestion is that as a gay man, I’m not a “proper man” in the eyes of the Vatican.  I don’t meet their understandings of what the proper role of men is, at least when it comes to terms of sexual behavior.[3]  In short, I don’t meet the Catholic standards of manhood and would find any attempt to do so terribly painful.  As I’ve heard some feminists say, patriarchy is hell on women in particular, but it’s ultimately not good for anyone.

That actually brings me to my second issue with the suggestion.  If patriarchal institutions like Catholicism aren’t good for anyone — or even if they were bad for women and perfectly fine for men in general and me in particular — why would I want to take part in it, thereby supporting its continuation.

There are a lot of patriarchal institutions out there, and the problem isn’t just the Catholic church.  Some of those institutions — like my career field — would be hard, if not impossible to simply walk away from.  I have to deal with the fact that I’m a part of them — and I try my best not to feed into their patriarchal nature and even do what little I can think of to help break it down.  But I have no reason or need to be a part of Catholicism, and I certainly don’t want to support or endorse its institutionalized patriarchy.[4]

If I’m going to seek out a male-only, male-affirming space, I’d much rather find one that has figured out how to be male-affirming without doing so at women’s expense.

Note:
[1]  And I pray for the day I figure out how to stop doing so altogether.  Even unintentionally.

[2]  Though it may be more accurate to say that polarities are discussed in gendered terms, but that’s something that needs a full post to explore.

[3]  I suspect that’s not the only place the Catholic church might take issue with my “masculinity,” however.

[4]  Plus, there’s a good bit of Catholic theology I disagree with, being a Vanic witch and all.

Paganism, Religion, Witchcraft

Let us bring forth that which has quietly formed in dark places.

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Happy Yule![1]

The winter solstice — that point where the sun’s rays are least direct on the Northern Hemisphere — officially takes place tomorrow morning at 5:30 UTC.  For those of us in the Eastern time zone (UTC -5:00), that translates to tonight/tomorrow morning at 12:30am.

The winter solstice marks the longest night of the year and the triumphant return of the light, longer days, and warmth.  To some Pagans and Wiccans, it represents the rebirth of the sun god.  Yule brings a sense of rejoicing, the darkest time following Samhain has is about to pass and the half-year reign of the underworld will begin to wane and give way to the brightness and warmth that is vital to our survival.

However, I think it’s important to remember as we begin to pass back into more light that we need the time of darkness to survive as well.  After all, the growing season and bountiful harvest rely on the gestational period of the dark winter months, just as our own psyches require downtime and decreased activity.

Yule marks the rebirth of light into a fragile, not entirely ready form, but it’s a birth that takes place thanks to the things that have been rejuvenated and seething in the darkness.  And while that fragile light shall grow stronger and eventually overcome the darkness for its time of reign, it will also be nourished by the waning darkness and the slumber it encourages.

So let the light shine in this quiet time, not as a brilliant force to be reckoned with, but as a comforting glimmer and a promise of what is to come.

Note:
[1]  Or for any readers who are in the Southern Hemisphere, happy Litha/Summer Solstice.  I hope you will indulge me in the rest of this post, however, as I focus on the mysteries I am currently experiencing/working with.

Books, Personal Development, Religion

Raised Right: Missing Childhood

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Today’s look at Alisa Harris’s book, “Raised Right:  How I Untangle My Faith from Politics” continues to look at chapter seven.  The underlying theme of this chapter — which I did not adequately explain in last week’s post, leaving my criticisms somewhat without the necessary context — is about how Ms. Harris’s conservative upbringing focused so much on politics that it consumed her whole identity and her relationships with other people.  I touched upon a similar phenomenon when I wrote about fundamentalist identity over at Confessions of a Former Conservative[1].  As such, I can identify with a lot of what Ms. Harris talks about in this chapter, though under slightly different conversations.

Harris speaks in the first paragraph of how her political leanings set her apart from many of her peers:

And while they were e-mailing one another about boys and fingernail polish, I was assuming the mantle of e-champion, which required two things of me:  an e-mail address to receive daily Bush campaign emails and the indefatigable conviction that I must forward to everyone I knew.

While I talked about how fundamentalist identity can consume one’s entire identity, I had not considered discussing how it echoes Ms. Harris’s own experience as described above.  Not only does such an identity consume a person, but it often becomes something that completely separates them from others.  In many ways, I imagine this is intentional, as fundamentalist and other conservative Christians find it important to identify themselves as separate from other people who are still “of the world.”  As such, this obsession with in-group activities to the detriment to other interests that one might have in common with their peers becomes an important sacrificial act demonstrating one’s “insider” status.

This is particularly troubling when one is young, as Ms. Harris notes that young conservative Christians — and I’d add fundamentalist Christians regardless of political involvement — tend to act like adults and associate more with adults.  There’s a certain sense where “fighting the good fight” becomes so important that simple things like expressing an interest in boys or girls, popular culture, and other things, which ultimately can rob such youth of their childhood.

I’ve often looked back at my own youth — and even my college years — and wished I had them to live them over.  I find that because I was so focused on being the perfect Christian, I put a lot of my personal development — especially emotional development — on hold.

When I finally addressed these areas of my life, I found myself trying to work through things in an adult world.  I found myself learning social skills and emotional coping techniques while holding down a job and acting like a responsible adult, as opposed to having the luxury of working through these things while still being able to rely more on my parents and having far less responsibilities.

This is one of the “holes” or distortions that Ms. Harris alludes to in this chapter of those whose politics become the whole of their identity.  It’s one that I felt she should have explored more.
 
Note:
[1]  As an aside, let me said that I’m quite pleased that Former Conservative has managed to rejoin the ranks of bloggers everywhere.  We missed you while you were silent, guy.

Books, Religion

TV pp.11-13: Meet the Pentecostals

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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.

After spending last week following Arnold the Catholic around his church, we find ourselves meeting Pentecostal characters this week.  These are the characters that Peretti are most familiar with, as he he belongs to that same community.  Three church ladies,[1] Dee, Adrian,  Blanche, are leaving Antioch Pentecostal Mission after a Sunday morning service.  They begin to discuss the possibly supernatural experiences that Sally and Arnold have experienced as any good church lady would do to keep her part of the grapevine well-managed.

One of the interesting things about their conversation is the hesitant credulity with which they approach Sally’s and Arnold’s respective experiences.  Navigating the supernatural experiences that others claim to have is an ever-present aspect of Pentecostal culture.  On the one hand, to immediately dismiss the experiences of others invites others to be equally skeptical of one’s own claims.  On the other, being too willing to blindly accept the claims of others leaves one open to being led astray by the dark and demonic powers.  This is demonstrated in the book when Blanche questions the weeping crucifix, suggesting that it sounds “awfully Catholic,” as Pentecostals are particularly suspicious of Catholicism.[2]  Indeed, there has been much advice and even a good number of formulas on how Pentecostals might seek to determine if an experience truly a miraculous encounter with God.

Of course, as the women talk, Dee gasps and begins to pray in tongues, for she sees Jesus in the clouds.  She points out the figure to the other women who begin to see it.  Soon, a crowd grows around the women as more people begin to see Jesus in the clouds, and more details are added, such as Adrian who sees him holding a hand.

It’s interesting to note that not everyone in the crowd can see Jesus, and some who do see him also see other animals.  Peretti writes this passage pretty masterfully in that we are left wondering whether particular experience is a true spiritual experience or the imagination of one woman that spreads among others, eager to share in that same experience.  One is left to wonder what really happened.

I find this interesting, considering this easily explained-away experience is happening to the very group who would — at least on an intellectual level — be likely to accept and even expect a more direct miracle such as Arnold’s crying crucifix or Sally’s disappearing messenger.  I imagine that Peretti is intentionally trying to keep a situation in which even the Pentecostal’s can remain skeptical of of whether or not anything legitimately supernatural is occurring.

The question is, if something supernatural really is going on, why would the source of these events want to keep anyone skeptical?

Notes:
[1]  Is this the concept of church ladies something that needs to be explained to some readers?  Or is this a fairly universal concept among most Christian groups?

[2]  I should note that not all Pentecostals actually think that Catholics aren’t “real Christians,” at least not in the sense of being saved.  They believe that some Catholics might be true believers in the sense of being saved, but find much of Catholic doctrine (as they understand it) to be in error.

Gender and Sexuality, Religion

An evangelical speaks frankly

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Warren Throckmorton is Associate Professor of Psychology at conservative Grove City College and the creator of the Sexual Identity Therapy Framework, a set of guidelines for therapists who wish to help gay people of faith (particularly a more conservative form of Christianity) to reconcile their sexuality with their faith.

Recently, Dr. Throckmorton wrote a blog post in which he discussed Christian media sources to refrain from discussing or even mentioning recent studies relating to sexual orientation.  The entire post (and the rest of his blog) is well worth reading, and is one of the reasons I respect Dr. Throckmorton.  As fellow gay blogger, Pomoprophet, put it while covering this post:

Throckmorten[sic] (though he doesn’t fully agree with me) is the type of Evangelical Christian that I can actually respect. He is informed and thoughtful. When he talkes about “defending truth is the name of Jesus” he does so with the best data available on “the truth”, not merely conservative talking points that fit nicely into his narrow view of the world. I find it ironic that many Evangelicals shun one of their own because he reports the facts and the studies and calls them on their anti-gay animus.

The fact that Dr. Throckmorton has faced much criticism from his fellow evangelicals — some have even pressured Grove City College to terminate his employment there — for his honesty and his integrity makes his commitment to both all the more admirable.  However, I would like to suggest that in this post, Dr. Throckmorton has gone beyond simply standing up for the truth, but acting in what some Christians might consider a prophetic role.  Consider this quote from his blog post:

Many evangelicals get their information from NARTH through groups like Family Research Council, Focus on the Family, Exodus International, etc. Others get information from Christian media. However, these studies are not reported in these places. No wonder most evangelicals approach sexual orientation with a 1990s mindset. It is as if the evangelical world is in blackout mode when it comes to current studies on sexual orientation.

Dr. Throckmorton is not merely standing up for the truth, but he is calling out those here are hiding the truth, misconstruing it, or even lying about it.  This has become an endemic problem among many evangelical leaders (for more examples of this, simply check out a half dozen other posts from Dr. Throckmorton’s blog, an equal number from Fred Clark’s blog, and my own post from Wednesday.)

Note however, that Dr. Throckmorton’s prophetic warning is not merely aimed at those leaders who would either leave their followers in ignorance or even actively deceive them.  His warning to those followers is also clear:  Do not assume that your leaders are being honest with you just because they’re standing in front of a cross.  It is up to those who value truth to verify the veracity of what they’re being told for themselves.  To do otherwise is to play some small part in their own deception.

Thank you, Dr. Throckmorton, for being such a voice for integrity and justice.

Books, Religion

TV pp.10-11: But he’s Catholic

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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.

As I prepared to discuss the next passage in Frank Peretti’s book, “The Visitation,” I was struck with how Peretti misunderstands his own characters.  The introduction of Arnold Kowalski, the custodian of Antioch’s Catholic church, makes that abundantly clear.  Arnold is a likable fellow, and I believe that Peretti takes care to present him as such, unlike the way L&J tend to present their non-RTC characters in the left behind series.  Arnold is depicted as an elderly, devout Catholic who takes great pleasure in serving his parishioners and someone for whom we are encouraged to feel compassion for as he goes about his job in pain from his worsening arthritis.

However, I’m not convinced that the internal monologue is in line with the character being presented.  Certainly, it is understandable for an old man in near-constant pain to wonder why God would leave him in pain.  If Arnold didn’t wonder that, I would wonder about his basic humanity.  Instead, what I take issue with is Arnold’s impulse to wonder how he can bargain with God:

Maybe I’m not serving God enough, he thought.  Maybe I need to work longer.  Maybe if I didn’t take any money for what I do here…

Among evangelical Christians — especially of the pentecostal stripe that makes up most of Peretti’s own environment — this line of thinking is quite common.  The idea that serving God brings on blessings and that the sign of trouble might be a sign of not being sufficiently faithful to God are common among such people.  If Arnold were the custodian of the local Assemblies of God church or even a nondenominational mega-church, the above line of thinking would make perfect sense.

But the Arnold presented in this story is a devout Catholic, and my personal — albeit anecdotal — experience suggests that this line of reasoning is not common among Catholics.  In my experience, Catholics are not particularly susceptible to bargaining with God or expecting HIm to take away their suffering.  Indeed, Catholics might be more apt to identify with their suffering and identify with Jesus.  After all, they consider the suffering of the Crucifixion to be far more central to their faith than most Protestants — especially of the pentecostal and nondenominational variety — are, hence their love of crucifixes.

Speaking of crucifixes, Arnold notices that the huge crucifix in the church appears to be shedding tears, so he seeks to investigate.  He checks out the tiny rivulet of water that is running down the crucified Christ’s cheek, verifying that it is not being sourced from a leaky roof or a fault in nearby plumbing before reaching out to touch the apparent tear, expressing some anxiety and fear:

He reached, then hesitated from the very first tinge of fear.  Just what was he about to touch?  Dear God, don’t hurt me.  He reached again, shakily extending his hand until his fingertips brushed across the wet trail of the tears.

Again, this strikes me as a case of Peretti not truly understanding who he established his character to be.  Why would Arnold fear a bit of water — even unexplained as it was — on the crucifix?  Does Peretti think that Arnold — and Catholics in general — are afraid to touch their crucifixes?  This would not surprise me, given most Protestant’s misunderstanding of how Catholics view such thing.  To many Protestants, Catholic crucifixes are seen as idols, and they make the mistake of thinking that Catholics see such idols as inherently holy or in some way magical.  So the thought of touching a crucifix — especially one that appears to be crying — would be some fearsome thing.

In my experience, Catholics are much more practical-minded than that.  While they certainly view their crucifixes as important reminders of the Holy suffering of their Savior and why that suffering is worthy of respect, honor and praise, the crucifix itself deserves no such honor.  Catholics do not genuflect before the crucifix to give honor to a wooden figure, but to give honor and respect for what is represented by it.  It’s a distinction I think that Peretti is failing to understand here.

The other possibility is that Peretti is portraying Arnold as a man who, having determined there is no “natural” explanation for the tears, now thinks it’s from a supernatural source (be it demonic or divine).  As such, his fear is regards to what will happen to hem when he comes into direct contact with this supernatural phenomenon.

This explanation doesn’t ring true to me either.  We have just learned that Arnold is in near-constant pain which has been increasing over the years.  Given his circumstances and his reluctant resignation to his lot in life, I find it strange that he’d be ready to expect the supernatural already.  I think it far more reasonable that touching the tears would simply be the next step in Arnold’s so-far methodical and common sense investigation of what he’s seeing.  At this point, he should be touching the “tears” to see if they’re actually there or a trick of the light on the grain of the wood.

It turns out, however, that the tears are indeed supernatural and they cause Arnold’s arthritis to instantly go away.  I suspect that this is the real reason for Arnold’s trepidation, written in by an author who wanted to a build a little suspense while leading up to this miraculous occurrence.  Those motives are understandable, but doing it at the expense of understanding how Arnold as described might act is problematic, all the same.

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, 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.