Let's Ban Christmas Again

For four decades in the middle of the 17th century, Americans experimented with outlawing the celebration of Christmas. In the rare cases when we've looked back on that time at all, it's as a curiosity, worthy of ridicule or puzzlement.

The time has come to take another look, and consider banning Christmas again.

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The War on Christmas is an annual tradition, but alas, only in the minds of Fox News personalities and viewers, for whom it consists of people saying "Happy Holidays" instead of "Merry Christmas," complaints about nativity scenes on public property, and—last year, anyway—debates over Santa's racial profile:

The Daily Show
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Dave Mantel hashed out the racial issue in a piece here on In Progress last year, but we sadly neglected the larger issue of the War on Christmas itself. But no longer!

The idea that Christmas is under attack because people are saying "Happy Holidays" or (God forbid) writing "Xmas" instead of "Christmas" is nakedly, obscenely ridiculous, akin to the idea that "diversity = white genocide"¹ in its breathtakingly offensive logical leaping. This does not mean that there shouldn't be a War on Christmas, however, as Jezebel staff writer Kelly Faircloth has pointed out:

Christmas has overflowed its traditional borders, annexed Thanksgiving, and begun laying siege to Halloween. You know what? Let's do it. Let's declare war on Christmas. Let's take up arms against this bloated, exhausting, consumerist nightmare. The end of the year is starting to look like the last thirty minutes of Akira. Christmas is the aggressor here, and Christmas must be stopped...

The minute we cleared Halloween, the trailer for Grumpy Cat's Christmas movie dropped. Elf was already showing on cable this weekend. Dunkin' Donuts just announced its artery-hardening, teeth-rotting lineup of Christmas beverages. (Including a snickerdoodle and sugar cookie latte!) They were beaten to the punch by Starbucks, who announced the advent of their chestnut praline latte the week before Halloween. Around the country, the New York Times reports, radio stations devoted to 24/7 Christmas are activating like ill-natured seasonal cyborgs. Even as Halloween revelers are slinking back home in batter costumes on the first morning of November, stores are busting out bells and bows and boughs. Photographic evidence available here! The switch is carefully documented by local news outlets, thereby feeding the frenzy. (Of course the Neiman Marcus holiday catalog arrives in early October, because you gotta get your orders in early if you want a $65,000 floral peacock sculpture.) And make no mistake—retailers are already trying to start the party in September.

Yes, Christmas has gobbled up the preceding four-plus weeks, a period once known and loved as Advent, now unmourned and forgotten by all but a few solitary souls. All this would be bad enough, but for me, the straw that’s breaking the nativity camel's back is the ungodly monstrosity that is Kirk Cameron’s Saving Christmas.²

The history of the evangelical Christian movie is long and tedious history, best left unexamined if one is to retain any shred of faith in humanity, but the last few years have seen a surge in the budget and reach of Christian movie making, with movies like Heaven Is for Real and God’s Not Dead attracting widespread attention and unprecedented amounts of money. It goes without saying that these films are abysmal, but quality is beside the point. They are about shoring up the faith of people who already believe in something, which is essentially the opposite purpose of anything that can be called art.

That Kirk Cameron’s Saving Christmas is not art is beyond dispute: not only has it been universally reviled among film critics as utter trash, it also currently holds the highest rank on IMDB’s list of the worst-rated movies of all time. What is most offensive about it is not its art-free character, but its screeching defense of the material and cultural trappings around Christmas that have begun to make it unbearable.

The cherry on top is Cameron's defense of materialism itself, made in a recent Q&A about the film:

"Materialism is actually a fascinating concept. The eternal God took on a material body, something we can touch and see. That's a miracle! And so it's right that our Christmas isn't just some religious idea in our heads and in our hearts that we think about and get goosebumps over. It should be able to download into the world in the form of things that we can look upon and touch with our hands. Like gifts for those who love us."

As Kelly Faircloth put it, "Don't mind me, I'm just choking to death on some gingerbread cookies, watching Kirk Cameron defend materialism in the name of one of the world historical figures most famous for renouncing it."

If even Kirk Cameron, evangelical Christianity's pop culture stalwart, cannot be called upon to recognize the crassness of Christmas, then surely any hope of reclaiming the holiday as a public good is lost. If Christmas is doomed, then, let it burn, that we might grow something fresh in the ashes.

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The Puritans banned Christmas because it was celebrated with a great deal of behavior they found unsavory. In the words of one Puritan,

That more mischief is that time committed than in all the year besides, what masking and mumming, whereby robbery whoredom, murder and what not is committed? What dicing and carding, what eating and drinking, what banqueting and feasting is then used, more than in all the year besides, to the great dishonour of God and impoverishing of the realm. 

They also objected to it because there was no biblical reason for celebrating Jesus’ birth on December 25. The whole thing smacked of a pagan holiday dressed up as something else, which of course it essentially was.³

Taken with permission from David Malki!'s excellent webcomic, Wondermark 

While the laws against Christmas were lifted in 1680, they effectively killed the old way of celebrating Christmas, and the holiday did not start to become what it is today until Americans began celebrating it in earnest again after the Civil War.

It seems to me that we could use something similar in our current age. Let's ban the public celebration of Christmas and its associated trappings. If forty years of law were enough to keep Americans from publicly celebrating Christmas with mumming, dicing, and carding, forty more years should be enough to erase the memory of Grumpy Cat's movie, Elf, crappy holiday beverages, and, we can only pray, Kirk Cameron's Saving Christmas. People could still privately celebrate Christmas at home and at church if they chose, but the incessant public spectacle and strain would be washed away in the cleansing legal tide. The holiday would return to its natural state: a single day of gentle joy, spent with a few friends and family members, surrounded on all sides not by months of crass clangor and consumption, but merely by the clean, quiet, cool winter air and a crisp dusting of snow.

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1. A real, very racist idea that you will have to look up yourself, because I am certainly not linking to anything about it here.↩
2. Confession: I haven’t actually seen this. I’m comfortable citing others’ experiences, trusting that the man who made Left Behind: World at War will have had little trouble matching and exceeding his previous accomplishments in the desecration of cinema.↩
3. Though there are actually some fascinating theological reasons for using December 25 as Jesus’ birthday, quite outside of any association with/coopting of pagan holidays. ↩

Church Shopping

Source 1, Source 2*

MY DEAR WORMWOOD,

You mentioned casually in your last letter that the patient has continued to attend one church, and one only, since he was converted, and that he is not wholly pleased with it. May I ask what you are about? Why have I no report on the causes of his fidelity to the parish church? Do you realise that unless it is due to indifference it is a very bad thing? Surely you know that if a man can't be cured of churchgoing, the next best thing is to send him all over the neighbourhood looking for the church that "suits" him until he becomes a taster or connoisseur of churches. The reasons are obvious...the search for a "suitable" church makes the man a critic where the Enemy [God] wants him to be a pupil.

What He [God] wants of the layman in church is an attitude which may, indeed, be critical in the sense of rejecting what is false or unhelpful, but which is wholly uncritical in the sense that it does not appraise—does not waste time in thinking about what it rejects, but lays itself open in uncommenting, humble receptivity to any nourishment that is going. (You see how grovelling, how unspiritual, how irredeemably vulgar He is!) This attitude, especially during sermons, creates the condition (most hostile to our whole policy) in which platitudes can become really audible to a human soul. There is hardly any sermon, or any book, which may not be dangerous to us if it is received in this temper. So pray bestir yourself and send this fool the round of the neighbouring churches as soon as possible. Your record up to date has not given us much satisfaction.

CS Lewis, The Screwtape Letters, Letter XVI, emphasis added

Like many Christians of the last several generations, I was influenced heavily by the thinking of CS Lewis growing up. My dad read The Chronicles of Narnia to me and my sisters when we were in elementary school, and after it dawned on me that Aslan was Jesus I started looking for other Lewis books to learn from.

The earliest one I found was The Screwtape Letters, which I read over and over again as a nighttime devotional. It continues to prompt me to ponder from time to time, though I haven't read it in years and realized recently that my childhood copy is no longer in my library.

The Screwtape Letters takes the form of a series of letters from a mentor demon, Screwtape, to his nephew, Wormwood, an apprentice demon in charge of making sure a certain Englishman's soul will be damned rather than saved. In writing the book this way, Lewis creates a sort of theological treatise in reverse, one which must be read for the exact opposite of its surface sense in order to serve its intended purpose. As a teenager I found this to be irresistibly clever, and I have not ceased to find it charming in the years since.

In my teen years, I learned from The Screwtape Letters a list of the pitfalls available to Christians. I had only to notice my fellow Christians doing something heartily recommended by Screwtape, after all, and it was clear that it was a practice worth avoiding and, where practical, criticizing.

Few Christian practices were more obviously problematic to my teenage self than "church shopping," which is what it sounds like: going from church to church until you find one that suits you. In Letter XVI, Screwtape talks at length about the usefulness (read: danger) of church shopping; he highly recommends sending one's human round from place to place till they become "a taster or connoisseur of churches." The point of church, I reasoned, was not to feel comfortable or to demonstrate one's tastes, but to learn, to worship, and to be part of the body of Christ. I was flabbergasted that adults found it acceptable to be choosy about church. It was astonishing to me that people within my own denomination would drive past my parents' church on their way to one with a bigger scouting program, better music, or whatever.

I was a teenager, so it was easy to judge and difficult to empathize. It would only be a few short years, however, before I would be taking a train past a dozen churches in my own denomination (and hundreds in others) in order to keep going to my church from high school. This wasn't church shopping so much as staying where I was comfortable, but I still felt guilty, as it was, after all, a step away from "going to church where it makes sense" toward "going to church where I feel personally at home and comfortable."

David Shay and I have debated the question behind all this anxiety and hand-wringing a few times. "What," we've asked each other, "are the right reasons to go to a specific church?" For a while, he was feeling uncomfortable and unhappy at his church. He wanted to leave and go somewhere where he could be happy, but was happiness a legitimate reason to change churches? Meanwhile, I'd moved across town and was now an hour away from a church I originally joined because it was close to home. But I was a choir member and a Sunday school teacher there now! Was high participation in a particular church's life reason enough not to change churches (to somewhere that might need me more—or that simply wasn't as silly to get to)?

We didn't know. In the end, we both did what we thought made sense after prayer, reflection, and consultation with friends and mentors.

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I got married recently, and my wife and I moved to a new place to start our new life together. We are church shopping, heading to church after church, Sunday after Sunday, to find one that suits us. Each time we do, CS Lewis's warning via Screwtape's Letter XVI flashes through my brain: Don't be a "taster" or "connoisseur" of churches. Just pick one already and stick with it! And yet instead of heeding this warning, I hem and haw through the service, tabulating which elements of the service I do and don't like, evaluating what social opportunities are available, gauging whether the music or the architecture fits my taste.

Being a teenager is incredibly challenging in many ways, but a few things are easier than they are in young adulthood. I miss the self-righteous feeling of knowing I would never stoop to church shopping and that I could comfortably judge anyone who did.

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It takes only the eyes to see it to notice that American Christians are nothing like as radical as the men and women who founded our religion two millennia ago. They wandered from place to place, calling society to repentance, renewal, and change. We are sedentary, suspicious of change, and resistant to calls for radical action. My biggest worry in all this is that I'm simply not radical enough to truly follow Christ. If I were as radical as Christ was, as radical as Paul or Peter, I would just go down to the nearest church and do church there. Never mind doctrinal nitpicking, never mind the music; we're all the body of Christ, after all, so I'd just go be part of the body!

Over against this worry, though, I have learned to take some comfort in the idea (and perhaps, just perhaps, it is God who comforts me with it) that, in seeking and finding churches where I feel happy, at home, alive and nourished, that I will be preparing myself to be radical in other ways: radical in faith, radical in joy, radical in hope, and above all, radical in love. At all events, this is my prayer.

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*Behold the magnificence of my photoshop skills.

Religious Freedom Bills & the Myth of Persecution

In his provocatively titled essay Does Faith = Hate?, written in October, 2013, Rod Dreher offers his fellow conservatives the following advice:

Though same-sex marriage is almost certainly the wave of the future, the country isn’t there yet. In states where marriage equality is still under contention, traditionalists could take advantage of this divide to negotiate a settlement that both sides can live with—one that protects both religious institutions and religious individuals. Time is on the gay-rights side, but its more pragmatic leaders may be persuaded that achieving basic marriage equality now is worth granting substantial protections to religious dissenters.

At first reading, I was persuaded by Dreher's concern for conservatives' religious liberties. What I had in mind, generally, was the need to protect people from being forced to perform or participate in religious ceremonies that they object to, and in particular to keep marriage traditionalists from being forced to officiate or participate in same-sex marriages. I thought the general principle was valid—I wouldn't want to be sued over my refusal to perform or participate in a rite that I thought was an invalid expression of my religion—and I also thought that the specific practice of forcing marriage traditionalists to participate in same-sex marriages seemed unnecessary and unkind, and at all events was unlikely to win my fellow progressives any new supporters.*

Arizona Governor Jan Brewer alongside a protest sign regarding Arizona's recent religious freedom bill

It was a bit of a shock to me, then, when over the course of the last few weeks, a spate of religious freedom bills appeared in conservative legislatures with far, far greater scope than what I had envisioned when I read Dreher's proposal. Instead of staking out a middle ground "that both sides can live with," conservatives took advantage of their legislative majorities in Arizona, Idaho, Kansas, and Mississippi to push through laws that allow for open discrimination on religious grounds—not just to protect religious individuals from participation in religious ceremonies, but to "protect" anyone from having to serve someone if they thought their religion could be an excuse not to.

This overreach is part of a larger phenomenon: American Christians have a tendency see themselves as embattled and persecuted for their faith, and they sometimes seek to defend themselves in ways which seem harmful to outsiders (and which sometimes backfire amusingly). It's not uncommon to hear people express confusion and dismay that American Christians, who represent a very solid majority of Americans, can perceive themselves as persecuted for their faith. What these people don't seem to know is that the idea of persecution is woven tightly into the Christian faith itself.

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One of the key passages in scripture for all Christians is the Sermon on the Mount, found in the Gospel of Matthew. In the sermon, Jesus enunciates his central moral teachings, exhorting his followers with such familiar phrases as "turn the other cheek," "blessed are the meek," and "judge not." Importantly for our purposes, he also says this:

Blessed are you when people revile you and persecute you and utter all kinds of evil against you falsely on my account. Rejoice and be glad, for your reward is great in heaven, for in the same way they persecuted the prophets who were before you. (Matthew 5:11-12, NRSV)

The idea that being persecuted for your faith is inherently virtuous is, it seems, encoded into Christianity from the start. And it's widely known that, from the start, Christians did indeed face widespread persecution—including imprisonment, torture, and death—for their faith.

Trouble is, that's not really true.

In her book, The Myth of Persecution: How Early Christians Invented a Story of Martyrdom, Notre Dame professor Candida Moss explains how we got the notion that the early church was viciously opposed and suppressed.**

She starts by carefully explaining the actual conditions that early Christians faced in the Roman Empire: Christians were poorly understood by most members of Roman society, were generally unpopular, and occasionally came into direct conflict with Roman jurisprudence and were killed for it. She notes that, far from being evidence for active persecution of the Christian faith, such state-sanctioned killings were part of a system of jurisprudence that also provided capital punishment for "accepting bribes as a judge or for defrauding a client...[for] burning crops planted by a farmer or making disturbances at night" (pg. 165).

From a Roman point of view, Christians seemed to subvert traditional family values and called down the wrath of the gods on society, and they were rumored to have practiced cannibalism and incest! What's more, when called into court, Christians had an irritating tendency to deny the authority of the court altogether, and to refuse to cooperate with the court in any way (Moss cites an example of a Christian who, when called into court on a charge, answered all questions—even "What is your name?" and "Where do you live?"—by simply stating "I am a Christian"). Moss points out:

It is like modern defendants who say that they will not recognize the authority of the court or of the government, but recognize only the authority of God. For modern Americans, as for ancient Romans, this sounds either sinister or vaguely insane...When militia groups defend their illegal actions on the basis that they don't recognize some aspect of American law, they are still thrown in jail. This is essentially the state of affairs for the Romans. (pg. 179)

While anti-Christian violence occasionally did flare up in the Roman empire, it was typically sporadic, local violence. Even Roman governors who killed Christians in significant numbers did so less out of hatred than annoyance; of one such governor, Pliny, she says, "[I]t seems that Pliny just wants the Christians to go away. Once they are in his courtroom, Pliny has no option but to deal with the Christians, but he has no desire to seek them out" (pg. 143). In all, Moss estimates that Christians faced perhaps a dozen years of concentrated violence in the first three centuries of the faith. This is hardly the mass persecution of Christians that is current in the popular imagination.

After Christianity was legalized in the Empire, Christians began to look back with a certain, slightly perverse fondness on the time when their religion occasionally seemed enough to warrant death at the hands of the state, and they began to write stories about the people who were killed for being Christians. In the minds of Christians, these victims were martyrs, heroes, worthy of both veneration and imitation. They wrote stories about the martyrs, and as the demand for such stories grew, authors began to embellish, add to, and eventually simply fabricate stories of early Christian martyrs out of whole cloth. We have hundreds of stories of early Christian martyrs' deaths; of these, scholars estimate that perhaps six accounts are genuine, and Moss points out that even these six have all been embellished and none are eyewitness accounts.

The most sinister element of the myth of the persecution of the early church is the ends for which it has been used. Moss shows that, from early on, church leaders drew explicit connections, linking themselves—and their orthodox faith—with the martyrs, and linking people they disagreed with theologically—heretics, schismatics—with Roman "persecutors" and, what's more, with Satan. In doing so, these early church leaders set up a pattern that persists to this day, wherein church leaders call upon the language of persecution and martyrdom to set up an "us versus them" mentality that cannot be effectively bridged, as doing so would be tantamount to dealing with the devil:

Persecution is not about disagreement and is not about dialogue. The response to being "under attack" and "persecuted" is to fight and resist. You cannot collaborate with someone who is persecuting you. You have to defend yourself. (pg. 254)

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(from a rally for religious freedom in Missouri)

The notion that American Christians' religious liberty is at risk is quite widespread: some recent poll results show that 70% of protestant ministers think that "religious liberty is on the decline in America," and that 54% of Americans agree with them. While it is true that the nature of the religious landscape in the country is changing, and that there have been conflicts of interest between some government policies and religious groups, characterizing these changes and conflicts as a decline in religious liberty is at best a mistake and at worst an active ploy to try to retain political power and a moral high ground. Moss writes:

The cultural power that drives these claims, the oil in the machine so to speak, is the idea that Christians have always been persecuted. In Christian terms, if you're being persecuted, you must be doing something right. It's a rather easy trick: if anyone can claim to stand in continuity with the martyrs and be victims of persecution, and if being persecuted authenticates one's religious message, then anyone can claim to be right. (pg. 250)

The perception that facing persecution is a foundational element of the Christian faith fuels Christians' perception that they are being attacked. As a result, they tend to overreact instead of creating dialog and working toward common goals. Christians should re-examine the history of their faith and try to better distinguish between religious persecution—a real phenomenon in Christian history, if more sporadic and less foundational than Christians are led to believe—and conflicts of interest that can be resolved or ameliorated if we work to understand those we disagree with.

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*My dad disagreed with me when I talked to him about the article in these terms, and I found his depiction of the issue from a civil rights/discrimination standpoint to be fairly persuasive. I still think it's probably not a great idea to sue someone for being unwilling to sell you a wedding cake, but I also think it's way sillier to think that selling someone a cake is an endorsement of the event the cake is for.
**What's interesting about this book is that it is not advancing a radical new thesis, but is in fact simply presenting the widely held scholarly consensus on this issue in laypeople's terms so that it can enter the public consciousness. It's long overdue: I mention later in the post that there's been extensive work done assessing the historical validity of martyrdom accounts, and said work has been in progress for over three centuries.

Photo sources:
1. Gage Skidmore
2. Mike Licht, Notionscapital.com
3. https://d202m5krfqbpi5.cloudfront.net/books/1366277434l/15818294.jpg
4. KOMUnews

What Does it Mean to Quote the Bible Out of Context?

The New Testament book of Hebrews says, "the word of God is living and active, sharper than any two-edged sword." Growing up in the American evangelical culture, I heard this verse used a great deal to describe the Bible. The point was to demonstrate that the Bible is not some dusty, irrelevant ancient tome that cannot speak to modern experience, but a book that remains vital to the faith and experience of Christians to this very day. In its most extreme form, quoting this verse can amount to a promise that merely reading the Bible is enough to change your life, because God will use it to speak directly to your heart and change you.

The trouble is, that when you read that verse in context, it's clear that it means nothing of the kind:

Indeed, the word of God is living and active, sharper than any two-edged sword, piercing until it divides soul from spirit, joints from marrow; it is able to judge the thoughts and intentions of the heart. And before him no creature is hidden, but all are naked and laid bare to the eyes of the one to whom we must render an account. (Hebrews 4:12-13, NRSV)

In Hebrews, the verse is referring not to the liveliness and potency of the Bible, but to God's personal ability to speak to and judge the human heart. The paragraphs that immediately precede this one make this more plain, as the "word of God" that is discussed in them is not a book but God's voice, speaking to David, Joshua, and others. There are places where Bible does speak directly about scripture (most notably, 2 Timothy 3:16), but this verse is not one of them.

Christians are almost equally fond of (1) quoting Bible verses while ignoring their context and (2) accusing others of quoting Bible verses while ignoring their context. One of the big reasons for this is that Christians—especially Protestants—see the Bible as the absolute best (and often only) source of proof that God agrees with them; when Christians get into arguments with each other, they resort to quoting the Bible as a prooftext to back up their claims.

A larger issue than this, however, is ignorance of and disagreement about what actually constitutes the context when it comes to a given Bible verse. Here are some examples of things that can count as "context," using American evangelicals' all-time favorite, John 3:16 as a case in point: 


Immediate Literary Context:

One of the more frequent meanings of "you took that out of context" when Christians hurl it at each other is the words right next to the quoted text in the Bible. The immediate literary context of John 3:16 is the story of the meeting of Jesus and Nicodemus in which it is embedded (John 3:1-21, NRSV). Placing the verse back into this context has the effect of changing how the hearer perceives it. The verse is transformed from a pat description of God's sending Jesus to earth (supposedly a sort of summary of the Gospel in a single sentence) into a small piece of a larger story and explanation of the nature of God, Jesus, and his mission. Instead of a rote phrase, we get a more lively bit of revelation, Jesus speaking about himself and his purpose to a confused and questioning stranger.

In some cases, putting a quote back into its immediate literary context can radically alter the perceived meaning of the verse, depending on whether the usual interpretation is contradicted by the words right next to the verse in the Bible. My earlier example, Hebrews 4:12, shows how the meaning can be altered substantially by placing a verse back in its immediate literary context.


Book-Level Context:

The next level of context is the level of the whole book that the quoted verse is a part of. We can look at a verse and think about its relation to the narrative, the messages, and the themes of the book it's embedded in. How does it fit in the narrative? Which messages does it support? What themes does it relate to? John 3:16 seems to relate to John's theme of Jesus' pre-existent divinity, and it's in keeping with John's picture of a self-confident Jesus who speaks in highly developed and often mysterious theological language.

If a verse seems to contradict one of the main messages or themes of the book it's in, or if it's out of sync with the narrative logic of the book, that may be grounds for examining it with greater scrutiny—is the verse sarcastic? Is it from a different literary source from the other content in the book? What does it mean if it is?


Testament-Level Context:

We can continue to telescope out the context of a verse by talking about its relationship with the major sections of the Bible it's in—how does it relate to other ideas in the Old/New Testament? With John 3:16, we can notice and ponder the fact that Jesus does not say anything particularly similar about himself in the other gospels, or we can compare it to the way Paul writes about Jesus' identity and mission in his letters.


Bible-Level Context:

Finally, we can zoom all the way out and ask how the verse relates to the whole book it's embedded in. If it's in the Old Testament, how does it complement or conflict with ideas in the New Testament? Does it point to an event or an idea that comes to fruition in the New Testament? If it's in the New Testament, how does it draw on or relate to ideas from the Old Testament? John 3:16, for example, draws on the Old Testament language of God's son, which would originally have referred to the king of Israel, and repurposes it to mean something more than simple kingship.


Cultural Context:

What we know about the cultures of the people who originally wrote and read the books of the Bible can radically alter how we read an individual verse.

John 3:16 speaks about people who believe in Jesus receiving "eternal life." Evangelicals have a tendency to equate this with life in Heaven with God after death, but in the first century CE, when Jesus spoke, the notion that after you die, your soul can go to Heaven, was not current. The closest concept to an afterlife at the time was the resurrection, in which people would be raised, body and soul, (or, have their souls given new resurrection bodies), to live again on Earth in God's new kingdom. Jesus could have said, "For God so loved the world that he gave his only Son, so that everyone who believes in him may not perish forever but may be resurrected," but he didn't, which leaves us to wonder just what exactly he might have been talking about. Here's one interesting interpretation.

A more immediate example of the cultural context reversing our understanding of something is Matthew 5:45, when Jesus speaks about God who "sends rain on the righteous and on the unrighteous." American Christians might be tempted to quote this to mean, "bad things happen to everybody," but if we remember that Israel is a hot, dry climate, where rain is very desirable, we can realize it means something more like "good things happen to everybody." (The immediate literary context also helps clarify this.)*



Documentary Criticism:

One way in which laypeople are especially prone to take the Bible out of its context is to ignore the fact that many of the Bible's books are composed from multiple sources. (John is probably not such a book, but there are people who think that it is.)

Scholars have spent a great deal of effort attempting to pick apart the seams of the Bible and discern where the different parts come from.** Especially if the narrative that you're reading seems to contradict itself, paying attention to the details of the story in this way can be crucial to a full understanding of the text.


Church History: 

Finally, the historical teaching of the church is an important context. How the church has read the verse you're looking at down through the centuries can be key to fitting it into one's faith. (For example, even if the original meaning of John 3:16 might not have referred to the afterlife as we conceive of it, the fact that many Christians have long treated it as if it does bears.) Not only that, but it's important to read the Bible in the light of the basic creeds of the church, without which it can sometimes be easy to end up believing some heterodox things; the Arians knew their Bible just as well as orthodox Christians of their day, after all.

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These contexts are all worthy of attention when speaking of a passage in the Bible. Note, however, that paying attention to different contexts may lead to contradictory or more complicated interpretations: the interpretation from immediate context may be muddled by something in the Bible-level context,† and the context of the verse in church history may be very different from its context when seen from a documentary-critical perspective. In fact, it's almost always possible to accuse someone of taking a verse out of context, because there are so many contexts one can pay attention to, and interpreters are rarely able to incorporate them all in their interpretations.

Even so, if we aren't mindful of context when reading the Bible, we take some very significant risks: the risk of accidentally reading our own culture into the text, or worse, we risk setting aside real interpretation for mere prooftexting, a mindless search for verses to prop up our pre-formed ideas about the world. But keeping all of these contexts straight—literary, historical, or what have you—is next to impossible without help.

There's a notion abroad in American evangelicalism that the Bible by itself is sufficient for God's purposes. It's what people mean when they say "the word of God is living and active, sharper than any two-edged sword;" they think they can just open up the Bible and it will speak to them, to their specific needs, right then, the things they need to hear. While I hesitate to suggest that God is incapable of reaching people in any fashion that God chooses, to expect that the Bible will operate this way is essentially magical thinking. When we read the Bible as if it's somehow written just for us, like there's a code there that just needs interpreting, we treat it more like a tool of divination—like a pack of tarot cards or tea leaves at the bottom of a cup—than a scripture.

The Bible deserves more respect than that. If it is to be, as it's described in 2 Timothy, "useful for teaching, for reproof, for correction, and for training in righteousness," then Christians who read it must make every effort to examine what it means, and how that meaning fits into the larger picture of our faith. In practical terms, this should mean that when Christians study the Bible, they should do it with a study Bible, or a commentary, or a Bible history reference, or something to inform them of what is going on at a cultural, textual, or historical level around the text. To do anything less is to risk too much.

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*I could add some related categories here, like Genre and Authorial Intent, but this list is already getting very long. Suffice it to say that we can also take the Bible out of context by ignoring what literary genre we're reading—e.g., forget that Revelation is a piece of apocalyptic literature, which makes considerable use of certain kinds of metaphor and hyperbole, at your peril. And we ignore the context of authorial intent when we forget to combine our knowledge of genre, cultural context, and other factors to make educated guesses about what the author meant when they wrote the book. Here's a great example of this kind of investigation into the authorial intent behind Romans 1:26-27, which is often used as clear biblical proof that homosexuality is a sin, but which is more complicated than that.
**A while back, my dad put together this neat demonstration, picking apart the two Noah stories that are woven together into one big story in our Bibles today.
† For example, Paul's assertion in Romans that Christians are justified by faith alone is complicated by the letter of James, which points out that faith without works is dead.

Photo source
https://secure.flickr.com/photos/lmlienau/121073591/

How Not To Write About Religion

by Bailey Pickens

I grew up a Presbyterian (USA) in the Deep South.

This will be the opening salvo to many an essay of mine, I’m sure. This is because it’s important: I grew up a mainline Calvinist (gently Calvinist, I’ll admit) surrounded by conservative Baptists. This means a lot of things—some of which I’ll write about later—but for now, this means I grew up very close to, but just outside of, various permutations of Evangelical Christian culture. My background seems to have me bristling at depictions of Christians no matter where I am: defensive of Christians writ large at my college in Chicago, of liberals when I visit home, of Evangelicals at my divinity school in Connecticut.

This past semester, I audited a class taught by Mark Oppenheimer, an NYTimes columnist, called “Writing About Religion.” A fun, lively seminar, it examined religion journalism of all sorts, from Christopher Hitchens’s hit piece on Mother Teresa (very highly recommended, incidentally—his conclusions are to my mind hysterical, but his obsessively collected and meticulously presented evidence complicates the new saint’s legacy in a real way) to long-form pieces on Scientology to disillusioned ex-Christian memoirs to a prizewinning series of articles on an imam in New York City.

The class gave me plenty to bristle at: though often pleasantly surprised by the writing and my fellows, I was just as often brought up short by what felt (unfairly, of course) like nearly deliberate ignorance. I felt bristlier by the week, and by the end of the class may as well have been a pincushion, exhilarated by the discussions but furious at misunderstandings of my own people and my childhood neighbors. I was given an outlet for my bristles in a paper assignment: “Use what we’ve read to talk about how religion journalism should be done. However you like. Opinions welcome!” And I had plenty.

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“I want to take every one of those girls aside and whisper to them the real secret of womanhood” is how Jennifer Baumgardner ends her 2007 article in Glamour on purity balls, leaving me wishing that she would whisper that secret to everyone, including me, who hadn’t realized that womanhood was a monolith with a trademark secret but is glad that Jennifer Baumgardner, at least, has figured it out.

“Would You Pledge Your Virginity to Your Father?” is primarily a portrait of Baumgardner’s own bewilderment that anyone’s answer wouldn’t be a resounding “no.” The article stumbles between statistics that complicate rather than bolster her thesis (viz., that the women and girls she interviews are entranced by the shadows on the wall of the cave [the cave is patriarchy]), poorly situated expert quotations, and words from the girls involved that are relegated to background noise.

The article is bad, and it isn’t bad because Baumgardner isn’t smart or aware or is especially unobservant. It’s bad because she writes about participants in purity culture the way my genteel, racist grandmother talks about black people. Baumgardner is unable to write about the purity ball she attended with any coherence because she is fundamentally unable to sympathize with the people she saw. Perhaps more to the point, she does not think they are to be sympathized with. The girls are to be pitied, the fathers viewed slightly askance, but their words and actions exist in a sphere separate from the sphere of rational people with healthy sexualities—that is, Baumgardner’s sphere.

This is worth pressing. Baumgardner’s total inability to in any way relate to the people she writes about here leads her into a species of pedestrian objectification that is appalling, especially considering her feminist background. She describes body shape, dress cut, and makeup use, as though offended at the thought of people with different, arguably dangerous—but at any rate backward and prudish—understandings of sexuality, buying into precisely the same standards of female beauty and prom fashion that animate every teenage formal event, everywhere in America, that doesn’t mandate the covering of shoulders. The tight fit of a promotional t-shirt “sends a bit of a mixed message,” she says, apparently endorsing the idea that tight clothing signals sexual availability, although the first thing that stfusexists.tumblr.com taught me is that that’s sexist. She is so unsympathetic to her subjects that she falls back on the sort of shaming of young female sexuality that one assumes she would ordinarily abhor. “In patriarchy,” says one of her experts (out of left field and after an ignorant throwaway line about “biblical times”), “a father owns a girl’s sexuality.” What a relief to know that, as my father never worked to prevent my figuring out of mine, I got to grow up outside of patriarchy.

I am not demanding that Baumgardner herself become an Evangelical Christian if she hopes to write an effective article about purity culture.

The problem is not that she isn’t one of them; the problem is that she cannot understand how anyone would be. The problem is that this is too weird to be worth genuinely looking at in light of the importance of father-daughter relationships to girls’ development and self-esteem, which statistics she includes without connecting them to the girls in question at all. The problem is that this is too weird to be worth looking at in light of girls’ ownership of their sexuality—even if it’s co-ownership with a male relative—against, say, the assumption of much of American culture that female sexuality and female bodies belong to everyone else, especially men. The problem is that Baumgardner is too invested in the idea of sexual exploration as the healthy model of teenage development to devote any scrutiny to the Texan she found for this piece who made a pledge (apparently unconnected to the balls) at fourteen, had sex at fifteen, and was pregnant at nineteen, and who is instead merely presented as evidence for the claim that purity pledges are doomed to failure.

The problem is that she wrote this article before she went to the ball at all.

Baumgardner doesn’t understand what she’s looking at. She can’t.

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Contrast this with John Jeremiah Sullivan’s article for GQ. “Upon This Rock” starts out precisely as smarmy and self-congratulatory as I would expect a GQ article about Christian rock to be. Sullivan is smarter than everyone around him, even (or especially) the people helping him get to the people he’s writing about. He pulls a cute bait-and-switch describing Evangelicalism as a cult controlling a dystopian future. He even condescends to the fat girl in the second section. The article is candy to anyone with a taste for too-slick, too-smart writing about people they thinks they're above, until a day or so into the Creation Festival, when Sullivan cracks. He writes it to the rhythm of physical exhaustion and hunger, but the larger point is that he knows the people around him. He can’t keep writing like they aren’t the same kind of person that he is.

Sullivan manages to write about affective community, essential humanity, and the work of Evangelical Christianity in the lonely and the damaged without ever suggesting that his readers should convert, or that Christian rock is good (it is, as he says, very bad), or that Creation Festival is a fun place, or anything else that might reflect a lack of critical distance. Sullivan’s piece is good because, though outside, he can sympathize with those on the inside, and in a way that can’t be written off with a nod to his adolescent experiences. A hip suburban church experience is little like the Evangelicalism of the desperately poor and marginal. The West Virginians who take Sullivan in quote from the King James Verson, not the NIV; Verm and company prepared him, perhaps, for Creation Festival, but much less for Ritter and Jake. Sullivan’s piece succeeds where it might have failed, utterly, as the first third at least suggests that it ought to fail, because he is capable of sympathy with people who are unlike him. He is capable of imagining a world in which their actions and words are reasonable, not foreign, and what's more, he's capable of imagining that that world is in fact this one, and not too far from home.

The obvious question is whether this is a sympathy required of writers about religion in particular, and at first, I thought that it was. I’m religious. I thought I wanted a treatment of religion that recognized it as special. I was wrong. The parallels between sports and religion are easy: insider jargon and shorthand, loyalties that can be arbitrary and fanatical, allusions to previous events and shared histories that outsiders can’t access. But there’s a piece of this analogy that we didn’t touch in class: the defensive Catholic recoil and the rush to protect rapist priests bears startling resemblance to the near-riots in Pennsylvania around Sandusky’s trial and conviction. I don’t need Sullivan to dance around the patness of Evangelical certainty, and I don’t need Baumgardner to decide that purity balls are the way to go if you’re worried about your fifteen-year-old daughter’s sex life.

What I need—that is, what I understand to be the obligation of a religion writer—is good reporting. Reporting cannot be very good if the reporter doesn’t understand what she is looking at. Reporting cannot be very good without a basic understanding of the field of play and an ability to sympathize, on the level of “also a human person,” with the people in it. Religion is a human endeavor that is important to people. It deserves precisely as much respect as, and no more than, any other human endeavor that is important to people. If the endeavor seems bizarre, humanize it. If it seems alien, familiarize it. If it’s harmful, show it. If you write about it, know about it. If you don’t know, learn. This is, of course, not an easy demand to make of reporters of any kind, that they be sympathetic and aware, but it isn’t a demand for special knowledge or for special treatment of the subject. The biggest holes in Alix Spiegel’s piece, “Pray (Can the secular world and the religious world understand each other?)”—the lack of awareness of Colorado Springs’s place in the American Christian jigsaw puzzle—could have been filled by five minutes on Wikipedia. The piece is still better than many because she does not make her subjects freaks; because she finds a deep attraction, a gut level “getting it,” about the way they relate to each other and to her. Andrea Elliot’s series, “Muslims in America,” soars because it does not flinch in front of difference or let difference dominate the story, and she seems to have done her homework.

If religion journalism’s major post-9/11 project is to be explaining religion as a motivating force behind national and global events, it must also treat it as something that is not just other, something simultaneously curious and understandable, like every other thing humans do.

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About the author:
Bailey Pickens is a divinity student at Yale, studying in order to become a Presbyterian minister. She went to college with James Davisson. This is her first guest post for In Progress.

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Photo source:
https://secure.flickr.com/photos/peasap/566255156/

Is "The Sinner's Prayer" Harmful?

This week, we sat down for a discussion, prompted by the video below, in which pastor David Platt talks about the Sinner's Prayer, a prayer that many evangelicals and people in other Christian groups ask people to pray when they convert to Christianity. The prayer consists of an admission of sin and a request for Jesus to "enter your heart" or become the central figure in the pray-er's life. Platt questions its validity and warns about its use, and that's the jumping off point for our conversation. Note that this is a transcript of a verbal conversation; we're speaking off the cuff. So feel free to take issue with things we've said, and talk to us in the comments section; we may very well agree with you, and at all events you'll give us a chance to clarify our thoughts.



James Davisson: Platt starts the video by claiming that people in churches are "missing the life of Christ" because of the sinner's prayer. What do you guys think of that?


David Shay: The main thing I disagree with David Platt about is a little outside the context of the video—I don't agree with him because I think that, there's a level of "the life of Christ" that reaches all life on this planet, regardless of a sinner's prayer. But in this context, he's saying there are people who aren't true followers of Christ because they are saying a prayer that doesn't really mean anything, that they're told to say, and it doesn't reveal the full essence of Christ to them. And I agree with that.

JD: Can you talk more about why you agree, David? Do you feel like you know a lot of people who fit his description, people who go to church but are missing the life of Christ?


DS: I can think of people, but of course I wouldn't want to say who I think is a "false Christian!" But I think this stems from a culture where, say, a person would be like "I said the sinner's prayer when I was four years old!" and then that person goes to church every Sunday, and they say they love Jesus, but you want to say to them "Remember when Jesus was yelling at the Pharisees for these reasons? You're kinda doing what the Pharisees were doing, every day. I think Jesus would yell at you." But you can't have that discussion with them.

So it's maybe not even the sinner's prayer that's the problem, but the culture of a church that thinks that all you gotta do is say the sinner's prayer and then you're in. There just isn't discipleship; the church becomes a hangout of people who have said this prayer at some point, and there's no difference between them and non-Christians. I've always wondered with people like this that I've met, like "Why don't you just not come to church on Sunday, and be productive on Sunday morning instead? It seems like almost nothing Jesus said matters to you."


Dave Mantel: And what is "salvation" anyway, right? Are there people in the church who really believe, in their heart of hearts, that doing a "repeat after me" thing is sufficient for an immediate, complete life change? Or is it something more? Something we don't actually understand, but over the years have consistently whittled down to these three or four sentences that somehow transform a person eternally? I know there's the whole "confess with your lips that Jesus is Lord" in Romans 10 but... I don't think what we're talking about is exactly what Paul had in mind.

JD: When English the word "salvation" comes up in the Old Testament, especially when it's used in the Psalms, it doesn't have the meaning that the New Testament does when it talks about "salvation," and it certainly doesn't mean what evangelicals mean when they use the word. In the OT, it just means, "[I am in physical danger right now and require] rescue [from said danger.]" It's a mistranslation or an imposition to call that eternal salvation. But we've stated elsewhere on the blog that reinterpretations and fresh meanings for older scriptures can be positive, so that's not to say that we can't use the Psalms to talk about a different kind of salvation from what the Psalmist meant.


DM: Right, and there are so many different kind of examples in the New Testament, too, of how salvation happens in people's life. Jesus told Zacchaeus that salvation had come to his house when he just said he was going to be a better person—he hadn't actually done anything yet. Just said he was going to. The criminal on the cross just asked to be remembered, the lame man was brought to Jesus by his friends and lowered through a roof—he technically didn't do anything except have cool friends...there are loads of other examples...it just seems to me that salvation comes in a lot of different ways and means a lot of different things in scripture, so to make up this thing about some kind of prayer happening and then a moment in time when you receive "salvation" seems a little silly (to put it mildly) to me.

Unfortunately, instead of simply accepting that salvation is something mysterious and possibly different for everyone, evangelicalism has created this kind of easy, one-size-fits-all answer, because Modernity had this need to create answers to every question, even if they're wrong. The focus in evangelicalism has been, for decades: get-saved-so-you-don't-go-to-Hell. But if that's not the point, since that doesn't seem to appear anywhere in scripture...if salvation isn't something to be achieved, per se, and doesn't take place in a single moment in time, and its primary purpose is not to save us from an eternity in Hell, then what is it, and how does it happen?


JD: It's a big question. Let's focus for now on shallowness of Christians that Platt is pointing toward, and how that's related to the sinner's prayer. Are there other sources of shallowness in Christianity, besides this notion that Christianity is about trying not to go to hell?


DS: I feel like that's the biggest one. That's almost why some people might say that Catholicism and "Christianity," western, Protestant Christianity, are two different religions. Western Protestantism today seems to be based around that notion of avoiding hell. I think there's all kinds of shallowness, though, there are shallow things Christians say all the time, and I think that's why many people raised in the church are becoming atheists. Do you know that there are people in the church who use Job to comfort people? "Hey guess what, God's just ruining your life to test you, are you going to follow God?" And people are like, "I would rather believe that there is no God and the world is chaotic than believe in a God who would torment me on earth just so I would still love God."

I'm bringing up that example because it's in the nature of what Dave Mantel was saying: there's something that we don't know, so we just insert an answer so we can sleep at night. Well you can't sleep at night, though, when your family members have died and say you then have a terminal illness, you know—when your life starts to look like Job. Before that point, you might say God tests people who say they love God by making their lives suck, but once that happens to you, you might think "I don't believe in a God that does this."

Another example: no one can say what happens after death. We can say what we think, but we can't know. And I was talking to a Christian friend, and he said, "People need direction!" And I said "Are you saying they need answers? Because what's worse, not telling people something that no one knows, or making up an answer to something that no one knows?" As far as life after death, we only have what we believe; we can't direct people to certain answers. I think you can be a Christian and still say that.

JD: For me, the big source of shallowness in Christianity is the failure to articulate really well the other reasons there are to be Christians outside of not going to hell. I got the message growing up that it was also about being free from sin and ceasing sin was part of it, and I think being free from sin is good and is a part of why being Christian is worthwhile. But the thing is, you can stop doing wrong without being a Christian, you can be an atheist who doesn't habitually do wrong things—there's lots of them, I know them.


DM: And there's another point where I feel like, at least for evangelicals, we've really missed the mark... because, what is the Gospel? What is the point of being a Christian? Is it to be able to stop doing bad things? To avoid hell when we die? I don't mean to sound like a broken record here, but if we don't know what the point of all of this stuff is—why we do what we do—then we're just following a morality paradigm and maybe being involved with a social group once or twice a week, you know?


DS: I feel like the only convincing argument for creating a religion out of Jesus' life is the Great Commission, "go and make disciples," and I don't even see that as being a convincing reason to make a religion. But I do think that making disciples is an essential part of the gospel; the book of Acts is full of this, it's a great follow-up to the gospels, because it's just the disciples going and being empowered to make connections with other people in other lands. I think we are meant to connect with each other, and I think that's part of the message of the gospel; you see Jesus breaking down walls and getting judged for it, eating with sinners, going to Zaccheus's house, talking to a woman at the well. That seems to me to be more in the nature of what God wants from us. I don't know if that would be on David Platt's agenda, but to me, that's the thing about the sinner's prayer, it distracts us from the importance of making connections.


JD: I think the gospel is something along the lines of: Jesus came to change human history, in part by teaching us not to exclude people and to love each other and be in community, and also in some mysterious way, by defeating death. I don't know how to define the gospel, and that's embarrassing. The big problem for me is that my definition of the gospel doesn't feel uniquely Christian enough—anyone can come along and say "love each other, and also we'll never really die."


DS: I think that's a pretty good answer though. I've had this conversation with others, atheists and agnostics, who are like "Anyone can be nice!" and I'm like "I know anyone can be nice, because Jesus is for everyone, God is for everyone; everyone can be nice because these things are from God and God wants them for everyone." Which is kind of a cheap answer, an infuriating answer, and it's one way that my theology is kind of cheap and shallow. It's kind of a cop out. But you can't believe in a God who is love, but the only way to experience that love is to say some words properly. What is more ridiculous, that a God has come and given us love, and everyone on the planet experience it and have it whether they know God by name or not, or the other thing, where some white guy from the U.S. comes to you and says "Say this! 'I'm a sinner and I accept Jesus.' You feel it? You feel the love?!"


JD: Any final thoughts?


DS: I agree with David Platt in that this prayer specifically is causing people to not really be Christians but believe that they are Christians. What an actual Christian is, he and I might disagree on, but we agree on that, and I think it's nice that he said it.

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Photo Sources: 
http://www.flickr.com/photos/johnragai/6999511358/
http://www.flickr.com/photos/powazny/2999422498/

Christians and the Earth

by David Shay

“The books of Sacred Scripture contain much more than what is written in them. Our soul also has depths unknown to us. On the sacred pages and in our soul, there are melodies we do not hear. In the spaces of the world there are melodies which no one catches because no one listens.”

—Eugenio Zolli

“The Earth is the Lord’s, and the fullness thereof.”

—Psalm 24:1

It’s 2009, and I’m at a large Christian conference. This is my senior year at a private Christian university, and I'm beaming with confidence as I start to be immersed in the Western Christian culture that is so prominent at Christian conferences in the US. I understand what attracts this sub-culture and what enrages and disgusts it. Having spent the last few years in a Christian university, I'm eager to hear the controversial hot topics of Western Christian culture discussed and debated. I also look forward to being in community with other semi-progressive Christian young adults, who want to push the communities of their faith forward.

This specific conference has a large variety of workshops to choose from. The workshops are the place to hear to tough questions answered, or at least to hear an attempt to answer the tough questions. The workshops are where a lot of the challenges of our faith come out and are tackled. Before I even know all the workshops that are on offer, I decide to go to whatever environmental workshop I can find, because I really care about the environment and want to hear what my fellow Christians are saying about it. I see that there are a few such workshops, and I go to the first one on the list, alone yet still very excited to learn. I’m not too surprised when none of my friends or fellow church members joins me.

However, I do feel a bit surprised at the small amount of people who show up for the workshop. It was a rather large ball room for such a small audience. (Technically, I’m sure now that there must have been more than two of us, but the only person I can recall is this girl with a large dreadlock—yes, singular—and bandana and then of course myself, sitting an aisle away from each other. So I have this kind of terrible mental image of the workshop being me and the single-dreadlock girl alone in a huge room listening to this topic I really care about.)

The workshop begins and I feel my excitement slowly deflating as I realize that the speakers are not touching on anything I haven't already…thought of myself? I feel bad thinking that these speakers are not very good, because they seem like great people. They are a young 30-ish-year-old couple and they talk about how having a healthy environment has made them feel better and helped them raise their children. That’s the thesis of the workshop. I get no new, fascinating knowledge to take away and share with my friends and fellow believers. No ideas to discuss with people. Nothing.

But still, I remain optimistic as I have seen that in a few days a speaker will address the issue of environmentalism and Christianity in the main conference session. This means she will be responsible to give a message on this topic for 20,000+ people to hear. Surely she will have something groundbreaking and important to say. However, when the message comes I have that same experience of excitement deflation as before. What I take away from the message is this: Trinidad is a beautiful country. And Christians should love each other.

I hear some of my fellow conference attendees talking about this message at the main session being the weakest one of the entire conference. I become even more deflated. The agenda that was so important to me is being overlooked and forgotten by my peers and fellow believers. I ask myself if my passion for the natural world is unimportant. Is the fulfillment I get from time praying in the forest preserves of suburban Chicago simply romanticized and irrelevant to the larger Christian picture? Why doesn't anyone seem to care about this?

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Ever since that conference, the more I’ve thought about it, the more compelled I’ve become to make the case for the natural world and our place within it, from a Christian perspective. I don’t think even progressive and environmentalist Christians are really grasping or communicating the full picture.

Let’s start at a material level. Our relationship with this planet is necessary for our existence to continue. Photosynthesis, the process by which plants take carbon dioxide and give off oxygen is amazing and awesome to witness. We give off a gas we do not need and in return receive oxygen.

Also, you have heard it said that money doesn't grow on trees. But I tell you the truth, that the sustenance you need to survive literally grows on trees. Money is something that we added.

The Christian environmentalist argument is usually that God created the Earth,; therefore we are obligated to love it and take care of it. But what if we changed the word “obligated” to “designed?” We have learned through the word of God that loving one another is what we were designed for. When we love one another and express that love by caring for each other, it is healthy for our spirits. What if the same could be said about our relationship with the Earth? It's not that we have to love the Earth, but that loving it and caring for it is what is good for us.

I'm not trying to use 1 John 4:12 to say that we need to love trees. If you ever have to choose between a human life and a tree, by all means choose the human. But perhaps when we hear that Yosemite is burning and ancient trees are dying, we should feel sorrow because we have a relationship with this Earth. Is it healthy for children to want to destroy ant hills instead of study them? Is it healthy for us to see the ways God's creation provides for us and exploit it? When God delivers manna, we take what we need for the day and leave it at that. Yet it's engrained in our culture to take more than we need.

At the start of this post, I placed a quote that speaks about "melodies we do not hear...because no one listens." There are unheard melodies—that is, untapped meaning and depth and beauty—both in sacred scripture and in the world around us. I feel like Christians already know that there are new meanings and beauty to be discovered in scripture, and that it is very precious to us in part because of that. Is it not also possible that our world—a place much larger, more poorly understood, and less explored than scripture, and created by the same God—is equally precious?

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Photo sources:
1. https://secure.flickr.com/photos/pagedooley/3650600124/
2. https://secure.flickr.com/photos/pleeker/139418540/ 
3. https://secure.flickr.com/photos/peddhapati/9703395209/
4. https://secure.flickr.com/photos/vkreay/6195960810/
5. https://secure.flickr.com/photos/80901381@N04/7950216844/