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. ↩

The Altar Call, A Thing of Troubling Beauty

Roswell UMC

All your anxiety, all your care,
Bring to the mercy seat, leave it there,
Never a burden He cannot bear,
Never a friend like Jesus!
"All Your Anxiety," by Edward H. Joy

The above chorus exhorts its hearers to come to the "mercy seat" and leave their burdens there with Jesus. To many it will sound at best obscure and at worst completely foreign, but to me, a person raised in the Salvation Army, it is the very sound of my childhood.

"All Your Anxiety" is the kind of song that gets sung during an "altar call;" it encourages people to step out of their ordinary experience and come to have a special moment with Christ. That, basically, is what an altar call is: an invitation to a special encounter with God. The altar call can be an instrument of manipulation and even cruelty, but at its best, it can also be a thing of profound beauty. I have not always recognized this.

To explain in a little more detail: an altar call, or "invitation," is a portion of a church service, usually coming at the end of the service after an extended period of exhortatory preaching, in which the preacher invites his or her audience to come forward to the front of the room to pray at an altar.¹ The altar can be an object specifically designed for the purpose (say, a large block of wood suitable for kneeling around), or it can be something more ad hoc, like a simple row of chairs. The point is to have something to kneel at and rest one's head and arms against in a praying position, and to have it placed in front of the congregation.

The altar call always takes place during an extended period of singing and music. During breaks between songs, the musicians continue playing in the background while the preacher resumes his or her exhortations, encouragements, and appeals to the congregation, often inviting again and again anyone who was too afraid or stubborn to leave their seat at the first invitation.

The purpose of all this is to (1) invite people to convert to Christianity by "accepting Jesus into your heart" and (2) to offer an opportunity for Christians to either recommit themselves to Christ or pray in a special setting about a deep concern. In both cases, others will typically come to pray with those who come to the altar.

The altar call is a holdover from a tradition that still survives in parts of American Christianity, the camp meeting.

Camp meetings originated on the American frontier as a way of bringing church to sparsely populated areas that couldn't support a church building or a full-time minister. Instead of regular Sunday services, folks would plan to gather and set up camp in a specific place and time, where one or more itinerant preachers would show up and preach an extended series of sermons, typically lasting for several days. There would be a great deal of music and prayer and religious fervor, often to a degree that modern Americans might find strange or uncomfortable:

"Revival" by James Sturm, pg. 15, from James Sturm's America

The altar call originated in this setting, though it has persisted beyond it even as the American frontier disappeared and the camp meeting became a rarity, serving as it does now a much less dire need (most populated areas in the States these days having enough people to sustain stable religious communities of some kind). Unsurprisingly, the altar call still carries with it some of the camp meeting's faults, namely a certain irrational emotionalism and an over-reliance on the rhetorical skill of the preacher.

At times, the altar call can be an aggravation, or worse. If part or all of the congregation does not feel convinced by the preacher's message, or is simply not in the correct frame of mind, the altar call can be a hassle; some preachers have difficulty accepting that no one really wants to come forward, and will drag the invitation out for a while just to make sure, or to try to save face. (Making an altar call that no one responds to can be a little embarrassing.) Sometimes preachers play on the listeners' fears, usually of negative outcomes in the afterlife should they fail to accept Jesus,² in order to get people to come forward.

What's more, sometimes an altar call just is not the appropriate thing: I once was in a church service at which it was announced in the middle of the sermon that one of the congregation's members had died quite suddenly (an accidental death). The preacher chose that moment to make an extended altar call, but no one was in the mood for (re)committing their life to Jesus; we really all just wanted to go home and be sad over our friend's passing.

At the same time, however, the altar call carries on some of the best elements of the camp meeting with it, too. Camp meetings were a time of fellowship, bonding, and community for people who otherwise might not see each other much, or who might never even have met otherwise. The altar call preserves this communal element by creating a time in which members of a church body can come and pray over their concerns together, to forge special sacred bonds with God and one another in prayer at the front of a community of supportive, prayerful witnesses and friends.

Camp meetings and altar calls will likely strike many as holdovers from an embarrassing time in American religion, in which an ignorant, backward religious culture sowed the seeds that would grow into the worst excesses of modern American evangelicalism and fundamentalism. While there may be some truth to this, it misses an important fact: the camp meeting, for all its excesses, was a tool for great good. The best example certainly lies in that most daring of nineteenth-century movements, abolitionism.

Wikimedia

As Marilynne Robinson puts it in her essay "Who Was Oberlin?", the abolitionists of the early 1800s "embraced unpopular, deeply controversial opinions. There was such a powerful stigma attached to abolitionism before the Civil War, and after it as well—what fanatics these people must have been to hate slavery so much they wanted to put an end to the institution altogether!—that to this day it is treated as at best a dubious project."³ While ending may slavery seem like the obvious moral choice to most people today, it is wise to bear in mind the weight of history and social pressure that the abolitionists were up against in the 19th century. Slavery of one kind or another is as old as human civilization itself, and it is no exaggeration to say that much of the prosperity and happiness of the abolitionists' neighbors would have rested on the economic benefits provided by an enslaved population. To the people of their day, the abolitionists were viewed the same way one might view a group that was trying to end the existence of marriage, or money, to name two equally venerable institutions. They were, in a word, radicals.

They were also certainly in the right, which should only serve to enhance our view of their courage. The abolitionists worked tirelessly and, in extreme cases, even fought and died in order to end a barbarous and inhuman practice. They successfully spread the message of freedom and justice from place to place and state to state, moving west to settle and create states of the union that would be free from slavery. The key motivation of the abolitionist movement was a Christian belief in equality of people before God. And the main tool by which the message of abolitionism was spread to the frontier was none other than the camp meeting, complete with altar calls during which people would affirm their commitment to the cause of abolition.⁴

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I have not experienced many altar calls in the last few years; my current church does not employ them. There was a time when I would have called them at best unnecessary and at worst actively harmful to the faith—what use, I wondered, was all this focus on emotional conversion experiences?

I have since circled back round to appreciation, however. The altar call, when done appropriately, when the congregation is ready, when the Spirit of God is moving, can be a special, I dare say sacred, time in the life of the Christian. To quote another Salvation Army tune:

When God comes near,
It is a special moment. 
He calms my spirit,
He takes away each fear. 
Oh such an hour, 
Of sacred, special friendship:
Such is the time,
When God comes near.

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1. In Salvation Army parlance, the altar is often called a "mercy seat," a lovely Old Testament reference which hearkens back to William Tyndale's beautiful, though illegal, English Bible translation. Hence the reference to "mercy seat" in the song at the beginning of this post.
2. Hell, in other words.
3. Marilynne Robinson, When I Was a Child I Read Books, pg. 176.
4. I will note here that "the abolition of slavery and the advancement of women's rights were strongly associated in the period before the Civil War;" Robinson also says of Charles Finney, an influential revivalist preacher of the era who serves as her primary example in writing about this period, "Charles Finney was a great reformer. His two signature causes were the abolition of slavery and the enhancement of the status of women." Both quotes ibid., pg. 170. When I Was a Child is a fantastic book, by the by.

The Church Is Bigger Than You Want It To Be

by James Davisson

Once when I was in college, a friend of mine made some disparaging remarks about Christians. I don't remember what he was objecting to—people who bomb abortion clinics or whatever, some extreme thing—and I helpfully pointed out that people who did that sort of thing aren't really Christians. "That's just the 'no true Scotsman' defense," he retorted.

I had nothing to say to that, mostly because I'd never heard the phrase "no true Scotsman." I think it's a phrase Christians would do well to remember.

First, an explanation: "no true Scotsman" is a logical fallacy that gets used sometimes when people argue. Person A states a generalization ("No Scotsman hates haggis!"), Person B finds a counterexample ("I'm a Scotsman and I hate haggis!") and Person A excludes that example with hand waving ("Well, no true Scotsman hates haggis!") without referring to any external, objective rule.

I definitely used this flawed defense in my argument with my friend. No one had ever told me I couldn't.

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Christians are quite fond of dismissing each other as "not really Christian" when they disagree with each other's actions or beliefs. Three examples, running across a spectrum of beliefs and circumstances:

Rebels in northern CAR. Source.

1. As you may know, there is currently an ongoing crisis of horrific violence in the Central African Republic. In a recent article, local Catholic priests were described providing shelter for Muslims fleeing the people who would murder them, Christian militias known as "anti-balaka." In the article, one priest is quoted as saying, understandably, "the anti-Balaka are not Christians." 



2. Christian charity World Vision recently announced that, in view of the fact that many church denominations have become open and affirming towards LGBTQ persons, it would begin hiring people in same-sex marriages on its staff. When thousands of people decided to stop donating on the grounds that they could no longer consider World Vision a truly Christian organization, World Vision reversed its decision. Other Christians subsequently pointed out that refusing to hire gay people is, to their minds, not really Christian. 





Not Phelps, but one of his cronies. Source.

3. Notorious bigot Fred Phelps recently died. While Christians have had much to say about that fact, few are standing up and claiming that he was a Christian just like them. Phelps was, in fact, a pastor, who preached weekly from the same Bible as all Christians, from his church in Westboro, Kansas.

As far as the world is concerned, these people are Christians. They call themselves Christians, they go to church, they talk about Jesus, they read the Bible—these are the things Christians do. They are Christians. Our internal disputes about what a Christian really is—like, "someone who is for/against gay marriage," "someone who is pro-life/pro-choice," "someone who is patriotic/anti-war," "someone who is not a complete asshat"—are immaterial to outsiders, and what's more, they typically have little or nothing to do with the central tenets of the church that formally define the core of the Christian faith.*

Refusing the label "Christian" to people we disagree with—even when that disagreement is passionate and seems vital—is a crutch. It is an excuse to dismiss someone. And it is not convincing; to an outsider, it sounds like the old joke that the worst player on your team is actually the best player for the other team—it's funny, but few people are likely to take you at your word.

Dismissing others as "not really Christian" allows Christians to free themselves from blame for their actions and to make no effort to engage, correct, or counteract fellow Christians who do wrong. If people call themselves Christians, it is up to their fellow Christians to point out when they are not imitating Christ, and to actively oppose them when they do so. We neglect this duty when we simply reject them as Christians.

Conversely, we also risk missing possibly valid points of view, ideas that bear considering, when we dismiss others as "not really Christian." It's a lot easier to ignore fellow Christians if we simply refuse to consider them Christians at all.

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Let me be clear: I am not saying anything about whether anyone in the list above is following the example of Christ. Several of them very plainly are not, to my mind. I am also making no claims about the nature, or reality, of the personal faith of those involved, or whether any of them are saved.

What I am saying instead is that, as Christians, anyone who confesses the central tenets of the faith, and claims the label "Christian," is our responsibility. To borrow an ecclesiastical term, all such persons are part of the "church visible"—the institution of the church and the body of believers on earth. Whether they are recognized by God as part of the "church invisible"—the "true" church of God (the true Scotsmen?) is simply unknown to any living person, and we therefore have no way to judge and should not try.**

In other words, it is not up to us sort the wheat from the tares ourselves. Let us instead focus on planting as many good seeds as possible.

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*Human sexuality, the dignity of human life, and issues surrounding force and violence are all important matters, but you will not find any of them in the creeds set out by the early church councils, which formally define the boundaries of orthodox Christianity. The ideas inside these creeds are the dogmas of the faith; stepping outside of them is heresy. Important topics not addressed in the creeds are matters of doctrine; different denominations disagree on doctrines; all are still Christian so long as they do not stray from the central dogmas. Things outside of the central dogmas but permitted by the church are sometimes called adiaphora, "things not essential" or "matters of indifference." I like this word and don't get to use it very often.
**I note here that the church invisible is almost certainly not a smaller circle within the church visible; rather, the church visible is a circle in a Venn diagram that overlaps with the church invisible. In other words, there are undoubtedly people who do not profess Christianity yet nevertheless are members of the church, doing God's work in the world.

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/

Camel Bones, Confirmation Bias, and American Evangelical Biblicism

by James Davisson

"When I see things like this I like to think about how the Hittites were said to have been a creation of the Bible authors, until they found them. David didn't really exist, until they found proof that he did. Pilate wasn't a real person, except that he was. Coelacanth, Wolemi pine, et al were extinct millions of years ago, until they were discovered alive and well. Countless attempts have been made to show the Bible as inaccurate and it tends to be vindicated in time, so I'm not worried about it."

If you're unfamiliar with the idea of confirmation bias, the quote above is a pretty great example. Confirmation bias is an incredibly common way of processing information among people of all walks of life; most importantly, it's one of the main reasons it's next to impossible to change peoples' minds about subjects they already have strong opinions on. To quote the Wikipedia entry: confirmation bias is "the tendency of people to favor information that confirms their beliefs." This "tendency" is so common that I'd call it nearly universal. If you have strong opinions about guns, gay marriage, abortion, the environment, or, as in today's case, the Bible, you will tend to believe without question anything you hear that confirms your opinion, and you will tend to heavily scrutinize (or outright reject) anything that contradicts your opinion—unless you train yourself and force yourself to do otherwise. And not just you, dear reader—I regularly delude myself with confirmation bias, too.

We've posted a couple times recently about frustrations and struggles with many Christians' inability to accept the theory of evolution—last week, an anonymous guest described his experience with a fundamentalist Christian colleague at a secular university, and before that, I talked about my own confusion and metamorphosing opinion on the subject as I grew up—and I'd like to build on this problem to discuss a deeper and more intractable problem for American evangelicals: their view of scripture.

Let's back up slightly, first. If you didn't click the link in the quote (here it is again), it's referring to evidence that one small detail among many in the Hebrew Bible is probably wrong: while the stories of the patriarch Abraham in the book of Genesis are usually dated to roughly the 20th century BCE, there is no evidence of camels in the region he lived in until nearly a thousand years later. (Specifically: if camels were a part of human life in the region, we would expect to find their bones in the trash heaps of settlements dated to the 20th century BCE. Bones of other livestock known to have been raised in this period are present and widely attested, so the absence of camels is pretty glaring.) Given that Abraham is depicted as owning camels, this information poses a problem for some folks, like our commenter in the quote above. Fortunately for them, confirmation bias can take care of things like this pretty easily: after all, a lack of evidence isn't the same as proof that there weren't camels in Palestine in the ~2000s BCE, right? Why even scrutinize this further—if it contradicts your worldview, it's easy enough to reject.

Fortunately for us, though, this quote reveals a major issue within American Christianity that's worth talking about. A detail this small (is what kind of livestock Abraham owned really all that important to...anything?) bothers this person enough for them to draw comparisons, not only to other claims about Biblical historicity, but also to coelacanths, in order to help them ignore this data, which means that something bigger and more interesting than camel bones is at stake here.

Coelacanths rule, BTW. Did you know a mature coelacanth is the size of a person?

What's at the root of all this is a way of reading the Bible that I'll refer to as biblicism. In his book, The Bible Made Impossible: Why Biblicicsm Is Not a Truly Evangelical Reading of Scripture, the evangelical sociologist and thinker Christian Smith defines biblicism as a set of widely held beliefs about the Bible in American evangelical Christianity that includes a range of interlocking ideas. The relevant ones for our purposes are the following (though see a full, and very interesting, list of them here):

• Divine Writing: The Bible, down to the details of its words, consists of and is identical with God's very own words written in human language.
• Democratic Perspicuity: Any reasonably intelligent person can read the Bible in his or her own language and correctly understand the plain meaning of the text. 
• Commonsense Hermeneutics: The best way to understand biblical texts is by reading them in their explicit, plain, most obvious, literal sense, as the author intended them at face value, which may or may not involve taking into account their literary, cultural, and historical contexts.
• Inductive Method: All matters of Christian belief and practice can be learned by sitting down with the Bible and piecing together through careful study the clear "biblical" truths that it teaches. 
• Handbook Model: The Bible teaches doctrine and morals with every affirmation that it makes, so that together those affirmations comprise something like a handbook or textbook for Christian belief and living, a compendium of divine and therefore inerrant teachings on a full array of subjects—including science, economics, politics, and romance. (The Bible Made Impossible, pgs. 4-5)

If you look carefully, you can see how the earlier items in the list logically seem to lead to the later ones: if the Bible is God's direct, inerrant, written word to people (divine writing), it should be easily understood by anyone who wants to know what God has to say (democratic perspicuity); if something is to be easily understood, it should have only one, plain, surface meaning (commonsense hermeneutics); if God's inerrant word is easily understandable and to be taken at face value, then it can serve as a source of clear, consistent, truths—not just in faith, but in all elements of life (inductive method and handbook model).

If any detail in the Bible were proved, without any doubt, to be wrong, this schema unravels; the Bible can't be God's very own words if parts of it are wrong (because God does not lie), and if any details of the words are wrong, they are all suspect and cannot therefore form the basis of Christian faith and life. This is why even the issue of camel bones can make someone resort to the questionably relevant coelacanths for support; it's too important to risk leaving out awesome ancient fish if that will help bolster the argument!

Buying into biblicism is really great; it allows believers a sense of incredible security and certainty in their faith. Also, it allows them access to a whole world of books and teaching on an incredibly wide range of subjects, all backed up with direct quotes from scripture and all completely "biblical." Take a look at Smith's list of titles:

This is one of several pages in the list.

Biblicism was definitely part of my church culture growing up. I read and was profoundly impacted by books like The Purpose-Driven Life and I Kissed Dating Goodbye, self-help books based heavily on key Bible verses. I wore a shirt as a teenager that said "Lost? Need Directions? Read the Map" above a picture of an open Bible—God's map/handbook for human existence. I saw and heard evidence of these ideas everywhere in my experience of Christianity, from the Christian book store to church camp and beyond.

There are quite a number of problems with these ideas; we've talked elsewhere on the blog about changing our minds on the specific issue of inerrancy (or "divine writing" in Christian Smith's terms above), but I'd like to point out a big problem with the larger, interlocking schema of biblicism as a whole. It's a problem Christian Smith calls "pervasive interpretive pluralism," but which might better be labeled "Christians can't agree on anything."

If it's true that (1) the Bible is God's direct, inerrant word, (2) that it's accessible to anyone of reasonable intelligence, and (3) it means exactly what its "plain sense" says it means, then logically it follows that all reasonably intelligent Christians can read and agree on the meaning of the Bible. And anyone who has met more than one Christian will know that this is, like, laughably the opposite of true. Christians can't agree on issues as diverse as free will/predestination, gender equality, wealth and poverty, charismatic gifts, and atonement and justification. Heck, we can't even agree on which issues are the central issues of the faith:

It will not suffice to respond simply by reciting the mantra: "In essentials, unity; in nonessentials, liberty; in all things, charity," because many of these matters that sustain multiple "biblical" views that cause division are essentials—particularly as viewed by many biblicists. There simply is not unity on many essentials. Furthermore, this response assumes more fundamentally that evangelicals at least agree on what the essentials are, which they do not. For certain kinds of Reformed believers, the sovereignty of God understood in a certain way and double predestination are clearly essentials of the faith—while for others they are not. For Bible-centered Anabaptist Christians, biblical pacifism and nonviolence are central to the gospel—while others serve in the US military with clean consciences. For some biblicists, the penal satisfaction theory of atonement expresses the pure essence of salvation—but for others it is an unbiblical and misguided doctrine. So not only are Christians divided about essential matters of doctrine and faithful practice; they are also sometimes divided on what even counts as essential. (pgs. 24-25, bolded emphasis and links added)

Smith's proposal for a better, "more evangelical" reading of scripture is an elegant and worthy one, neither liberal nor conservative, but simply Christian: read the Bible as, above all else, a book about Jesus. Smith challenges biblicists, and all Christians, to remember that Christ is the "real purpose, center, and interpretive key" to the Bible. If we read the Bible this way, our focus is not on what a Bible verse can tell about us "biblical" dieting or romance or the origins of the universe, but instead on how it relates to our understanding of Jesus Christ. In Smith's words, "We do not then read scripture devotionally to try to find tidbits there that are 'meaningful to' or that 'speak to' us, wherever we are in our personal subjective spiritual experiences. We do not read scripture as detached historians trying to judge its technical accuracy in recounting events. We do not read scripture as a vast collection of infallible propositions whose meanings and implications can be understood on their own particular terms. We only, always, and everywhere read scripture in view of its real subject matter: Jesus Christ."

In the middle of that quote is a sentence that strikes me at least as hard as it does any biblicist; too often I can be a "detached historian" when reading scripture, allowing myself to revel in the literary details of the text without thinking even for a moment how it enriches the picture of Christ, points to an idea about Christ, or relates in any way to Christ and Christian faith. I am as guilty as anyone of misreading the Bible for my own ends, of bending it so that it says what I want it to say rather than coming to it and asking what it says, and particularly what it says about the fact that God came to earth as Jesus, and in the process, taught us, led us, and saved us for God's own better, fuller purposes.

If you are a Christian, and this is not how you have been reading scripture, I challenge you: why not? In the face of evidence that the Bible is not for communicating dating advice or exact knowledge about ancient Palestinian ungulates, would you not rather believe that it is God's written word, sent to tell us about and remind us of God's lived Word in the world, Jesus Christ? It's something to consider, friends.

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Photo sources:
1. https://secure.flickr.com/photos/manojvasanth/4119668254
2. https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Marjorie_Courtenay-Latimer_and_Coelacanth.jpg
3. The Bible Made Impossible, pg. 9

Religion in the Workplace: A Story

by an Anonymous Guest Poster¹

I want to introduce myself before I begin, as I’ve never written here before. I’m a graduate student in the physics department at a large research university. James Davisson is a friend of mine from college. I am not a particularly religious person, but some events that happened a couple years ago got me thinking about combining religion with professional life. James invited me to write about it here.

The following stories feature a former colleague and classmate of mine, who I will call Quentin. Quentin is an Evangelical Christian whose personal faith came up against the secular world of academic research. His very public enthusiasm for Christianity led to him becoming isolated from the rest of his colleagues, who largely did not understand his views or how to react to his behavior. At the same time, Quentin’s inability to separate his personal religious life from his work life seemed to indicate a misunderstanding of how one should behave at work. Eventually, he decided that Christianity was more important to him than physics, and left the department to pursue a stint of missionary work in Africa.

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I first encountered Quentin over the Internet: before myself and my cohort of graduate students arrived in the Fall, he started a Facebook group to help all of us get to know one another. About a week into our first semester, he posted a note to all members of the group. Being physicists, he knew that we would all appreciate the challenge of an order of magnitude problem. Instead of asking us to estimate the number of piano tuners in New York City, his note used scripture and a great deal of jargon to argue that Jesus is Lord with probability 1.

Quentin’s argument began:

The basis of this argument is the idea that information cannot travel backwards in time, which is a fundamental principle of general relativity. In other words, one cannot accurately predict the future. I hold that the Old Testament scriptures contain enough accurate prophesy [sic] that they seemingly demonstrate a violation of this Physics “law.” Further I hold that there are no other religious documents that foretell the future as accurately, specifically, and abundantly enough to rule out statistical chance. A violation of this Physical “law” is really a way that God demonstrates his sovereignty, not a violation of physics itself.

Upon seeing this, a lot of us were perplexed to say the least. Wasn’t the Facebook group intended for a secular, academic group? If Quentin really believed that the acts of God superseded physical laws, what was he doing studying physics in graduate school? There was also a great deal of derision that followed – people found it very easy to dismiss the post as evidence of craziness or stupidity.

Over the next few months, the other graduate students learned more and more about Quentin’s beliefs and religious practice. He thought evolution was a lie. He had very negative things to say about homosexuals and same-sex marriage. Outside of his office, he posted a large, friendly sign proclaiming that the Kingdom of Christ lived within him, and offered laying on of hands and prayer to whomever wanted it (I emphasize: this was at work, at a secular university). At one time, he claimed that he could raise the dead. His beliefs were baffling and offensive to many in the department. Quentin’s colleagues began to talk about him behind his back. He became a topic of conversation at parties, a focal point of derisive curiosity. Most of the mockery took place from afar (although there were a number of passive-aggressive flame wars that took place over Facebook). Needless to say, my colleagues’ (and perhaps my own) reaction to Quentin was not kind.

A lot of us scientists are vexed by the counterfactual beliefs maintained by many Americans. Creationism, for example, doesn’t make any sense to us, and to hear about how so many people cling to the notion that evolution must be wrong² (a hyperbolic example here), is deeply frustrating. At best, it reveals poor education. At worst, it is an attack on our modern, secular way of understanding the world. I believe that to some of his colleagues Quentin became the perfect picture of mindless, backwards ignorance. It is no wonder that so many people reacted with frustration and anger at Quentin’s presence in the department.

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During our second year Quentin offered to give a presentation at the Physics Graduate Student Organization-sponsored lunch seminars. At the time, I was part of the PGSO (our department’s student organization), and organized some informal talks where students were invited to present and discuss their research interests or other ideas. A week before his presentation, Quentin emailed me his title and abstract:

Authority Theory
Have you ever wondered what exactly it is that makes right things “right” or wrong things “wrong?” In this seminar I will unveil a brand new philosophical argument about the nature of authority using very simple ideas from graph theory mathematics to help answer such questions. We start with some definitions, use some logic, and demonstrate some interesting and important philosophical implications that impact our society at every level. Lastly, I will show the proof of the following theorem: God exists if and only if a finite number of beings with authority exist. This discovery has many interesting implications which we can hopefully discuss.

I replied to Quentin that his talk did not seem to be within the purview of physics. I suggested to him that he focus on the graph theory and mathematics, rather than proving that God exists. I also requested that mentions of God be removed from his abstract. Quentin agreed, on the condition that I substitute “exactly one being with ultimate and final authority” for God. I made the changes and notified my fellow graduate students of the upcoming talk. Within minutes I had received several complaints that the talk was obviously religious in nature, and that our academic student organization should not be sponsoring a Christian polemic. I wanted to keep Quentin’s talk on the schedule if possible. I didn’t want him to feel separated from or censored by the department because of his interest in religion. But at the same time, the students who complained were right that a religious talk would not be appropriate in that academic setting.

Kicking myself for not talking to Quentin about this before making the announcement, I talked to him about whether or not his talk did contain academic content. I told him that several people had complained because of what seemed like a religious agenda. Was there any way for him to remove the religious emphasis and focus instead on his mathematical or philosophical interests? Quentin told me that he had been confused: His talk had no physics in it, but I had never explicitly told him that the talk needed to be related to physics or research. (To be fair, he was right in that regard.) There was no way for me to allay the suspicions of the grad students who had complained, so I canceled his talk. I told Quentin that the PGSO’s lunch talks were not the appropriate venue for him to publicly discuss his interests, but encouraged him to find a different venue. At the time, I felt bad that I had to reject Quentin’s talk (and embarrassed that it had been made public before), but was relieved that his talk would not be associated with the PGSO.

What followed was this: several weeks later, Quentin scheduled the use of a classroom himself and gave his presentation publicly. Almost fifty people showed up. A few of them were interested in learning about Authority Theory, and how one could use graph theory in the context of theology and philosophy. Many others, by contrast, were there to nitpick Quentin’s arguments. They interrupted him while he spoke. They peppered him with questions and made it hard for him to work through the talk. They wanted to see him fail. Frankly, they were very rude to him, in the loud, smug way that arguments are made anonymously in Internet forums. At one point, Quentin’s former office mate spoke up and told everyone to be quiet and let him finish.

As for the content of the talk itself, it would be an exaggeration to say that Quentin had thought everything through clearly or argued convincingly. His talk borrowed concepts from graph theory as a way to justify the belief in a single God.³ It was clear that he had begun at the conclusion and worked backwards, as the assumptions were nonsensical, and the argument itself didn’t actually prove his thesis in the end. A friend of mine said to me later, “If this is what he spent a year thinking about, and then presented it as a completed project, then something is wrong.” Quentin’s talk certainly didn’t deserve the scorn that it received from some people, but it was very, very flawed. It seemed to confirm what many people already believed about him: that he was so distracted by his creed that he was incapable of reasoning.

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I want to be clear: I’m not writing about this because I want to reveal the hypocrisy of non-religious liberals. It would be easy to interpret these events that way, after all, since this does seem like an example of how self-professed free-thinking academic types turned on one of their colleagues for being a Christian. This story is more complex than that. Yes, Quentin was a Christian, and yes, my colleagues (and, I admit, myself at times) were rude to Quentin and marginalized him because his beliefs seemed foolish. But, as time has passed, I have come to think of Quentin’s presence in the department not as a reaction to Evangelical Christianity, but how any average social group will react to an outsider who does not know how to behave.

There are plenty of religious people in my department. I have friends who go to Church and shul regularly. A couple of my coworkers wear kippahs, and a collaborator in my research group wears Sikh religious articles. A Christian colleague I know would wear a cross but cannot do so at work for laboratory safety reasons. So these colleagues of mine are openly religious, and in conversation they will occasionally bring up their religious practices. The community doesn’t react badly to this kind of casual behavior at all. Personally, I’m quite comfortable living in a work environment that accommodates people who follow different religions.

Quentin, as anyone, was entitled to his personal religious beliefs and practice. That being said, Quentin decided to bring his religion to work with him and advertise it loudly and up front. I have no idea why he thought this was a good idea, although I speculate that part of his faith included active pursuit of disseminating his religious ideas to others.

The first impression Quentin made with his Facebook message, his public display of evangelism in his office, his attempt to deliver a theological talk at a venue for discussing scientific research, and other events all seemed to indicate that Quentin was confused about what was appropriate for work and what needed to stay at home. Quentin’s colleagues turned against him not because he was a religious conservative, but because he that he was aggressive about advertising his enthusiasm for Christianity in a professional context where nobody else talked about religion in the same way. His behavior was far enough outside the established norm that he made the people around him uncomfortable. I don’t know whether any of his mentors in the department, his academic or research advisors, ever confronted him about mixing work and religion, but it certainly seems that conversation might have helped Quentin fit in a little better.

Overall, Quentin seemed to lack a degree of what is often called common sense, meaning an understanding of tacitly agreed-upon rules of social engagement. In this case, his lack of common sense manifested itself in such a way as to present to his colleagues the image of a ludicrous religious fundamentalist. He did not deserve the mockery that was directed at him, but I find myself wondering whether there was a way for him to keep his personal beliefs private so as not to confuse or annoy others in the workplace.

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Quentin left the department after two years, completing a Master’s but not a PhD. He worked as a missionary in Africa for six months, and has moved on to work as a programmer for a large software company. I wish Quentin well for the future. I hope he figures out what he wants from his career, and that he finds a work environment that’s a little more accepting of him than we were. I hope he figures out how to balance his professional and private life.

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1. Editor's Note: Today's guest poster wishes to remain anonymous for reasons that will probably be clear from reading the post. If you're offended, confused, or delighted about this, email us about it at theologyinprogress@gmail.com. The title picture are not related to the author of the post; we just thought it looked nice.
2. Editor's Note: Evolution and creationism is actually a subject which we've tackled on the blog before from a Christian perspective; read about it here.
3. Quentin tried to model the relationships between all beings as master-slave, where the upper tiers commanded the lower tiers, allowing him to "model" everyone as belonging to a directed graph.  Quentin then tried to argue that the "authority structure" meant that those graphs must be treelike (having no loops).  He disregarded (or at least, had no convincing argument against) the possibility of having two "ultimate authority" nodes in the same graph, as well as the possibility of having two disjointed graphs.  In other words, even if you did buy his argument that there was an ultimate authority figure, there could have been more than one of them.  So, for all we know, there is an equally powerful God on Neptune who has never been to Earth

Photo source: 
http://www.flickr.com/photos/joeshlabotnik/1198523560/

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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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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