Evangelicalism is in deep trouble

In the Christian Century, Rodney Clapp concludes:

[Evangelicalism]  is in deep trouble because it faces a significant cultural and generational shift. Identifying itself with the wedge tactics of the political right, which is now falling (at least for a time) out of power, the movement cannot easily shake the image of being primarily negative and destructive. Indicators show that it is losing attractiveness not only among unconverted fellow Amer icans, but among its own young.

More significantly, evangelicalism is in deep trouble because the gospel really is good news, and reactionaries are animated by bad news, by that which they stand against. Undoubtedly Jesus Christ faced and even provoked conflict. But he embraced conflict as a path or means to the health and liberation—the salvation—of the world. And he hoped for salvation even, perhaps especially, for his enemies. If evangelicalism is innately reactionary, then it can follow Christ only by being born again.

Doubt about religion

I’m going to write about this someday (or at least I sense that is the trajectory of my existence).  For now I’m just going to accumulate some links.

A writer describes his loss of faith, thanks to the antics of Christians and their institutions.  http://newhumanist.org.uk/1630

A new book by a religion writer for the L. A. Times: Losing My Religion: How I Lost My Faith Reporting on Religion in America — and Found Unexpected Peace.

Another book which makes my list, which I haven’t read (and, I think I will not find this particular one that compelling), but here it is anyway:  Why I Became an Atheist: A Former Preacher Rejects Christianity.  The reason is (a bit condescendingly) that the author is a former minister of the Church of Christ, a denomination within which there has always been a disproportionate amount of things not to be believed in the first place, and … well, he was a minister in a fundamentalist denomination.  People like that who “come to repentance” don’t need to be “converting” and immediately writing books (that’s what they do before they convert); they need to be in seclusion, meditating on their prior folly.

Perhaps (but perhaps not) Bart Ehrman should be mentioned (reason for the “not” is that he pumps out books with a rapidity that I find disconcerting, but maybe he’s just a former fundamentalist version of Garry Wills).  He has a bit of “spiritual” autobiography in his book Misquoting Jesus (poor title) which is a layperson’s version, it seems to me of his The Orthodox Corruption of Scripture, which is excellent.   His most recent books are Jesus, Interrupted: Revealing the Hidden Contradictions in the Bible (And Why We Don’t Know About Them) and God’s Problem: How the Bible Fails to Answer Our Most Important Question — Why We Suffer.  He was on Terry Gross about a week ago discussing the Jesus Interrupted book and his journey to non-faith.

Although I’m interested in Ehrman, I think his argument is with religious concepts primarily (which is fine); but the first couple of citations for me are more interesting to me today, because they suggest a loss of faith triggered by the actions of religious people and their institutions.  This is what I identify with — sympathetic to the ethical concepts and idealism that I discern within Christianity, or at least within the scriptures of Christianity, I nevertheless see glaring discrepancies between the people and institutions that represent Christianity and claim to be its most reliable, if not infallible (the Roman Catholics excepted) interpreters.  American evangelicals of the last thirty years, and especially the last decade, have made a complete botch of things.  Their apparent lack of embarrassment at, or perhaps obliviousness to, the fact only confirms what I’m going to say next, and that is, if they are in possession of the “transcendent Word” or “gospel” (which I believe in, in a way), where the hell is the power of that word in their lives and institutions?  For any merely slightly sentient person, it is glaringly clear that their agenda is driven on a broad scale by cultural predispositions (white, Southern, nationalistic provincialism equated in the minds of the garden variety evangelical with “conservatism”), and more specifically by the agenda of a particular (and secular) political party.

Rats, I nearly wrote the essay.

The essence of Cheney (& Bush)

Scott Horton has a post about a Vanity Fair article about Cheney written Lawrence Wilkerson, aide to Colin Powell as Secy of State (Wilkerson came out against Cheney/Bush already years ago):

http://www.harpers.org/archive/2009/01/hbc-90004114

“He became vice president well before George Bush picked him,” Wilkerson said of Cheney. “And he began to manipulate things from that point on, knowing that he was going to be able to convince this guy to pick him, knowing that he was then going to be able to wade into the vacuums that existed around George Bush — personality vacuum, character vacuum, details vacuum, experience vacuum.”

This is consistent with Angler, a new book about Cheney as VP.

Nailed it:  “personality vacuum, character vacuum, details vacuum, experience vacuum.”

So happy to be wrong …

Update:  That would be “Radiance” and “Renegade”.

Check out the last paragraph in the link for the origins of the word “renegade”. Never mind; here it is:

There’s no word on why Obama selected Renegade.

But it’s a sure bet he wasn’t thinking about the word’s origins. According to the Online Etymology Dictionary, Renegade’s earliest meanings had to do with deserting one’s religion, coming from the Spanish word “renegado,” originally “Christian turned Muslim.”

I haven’t seen any indication the vaporous right wing has picked up on this yet, but if I could bet the farm that they will, I would.

A rant on the national debt and Republican irresponsibility

This is a graph I’ve seen before, and it is a couple of years out of date.  It is appropriate to look at it again, since the situation has only gotten worse.  An analogy to personal finance would be the ratio of mortgage debt to salary.  If you buy a new house every year, but your salary goes up faster than your debt, the situation is sustainable. However, if your debt goes up faster than your salary, then eventually you will be unable to maintain your house.

The latest deficit figures came out today; this year’s deficit exceeds $400 billion, which will make the total national debt at or near $10 trillion dollars.  At 5% interest (which hopefully is a little high), the cost of servicing this debt is $500 billion per year.

For perspective, this is over three times the annual cost of the Iraq War.

In Scientific American a couple months ago there was an article about a crash program to build out a solar power generation and electricity distribution infrastructure that would achieve the goal of 60%-80% reduction in CO2 emissions by 2050.  The cost?  $400 Billion over 10-20 years.

Republicans, in their mission to drill, are currently obstructing every initiative to build out a renewable energy infrastructure which would substantially reduce if not eliminate our dependence on non-renewable fossil fuels.  Are we crazy, or what?

The Democrats appear to be inept in their attempts at governing.

The Republicans, however, are criminally negligent.  It is obvious for anyone who has eyes to see that the car is heading toward a cliff.  And they are stepping on the gas.

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Source: Economic Report of the President 2005 Table B-78, available online at http://a257.g.akamaitech.net/7/257/2422/17feb20051700/www.gpoaccess.gov/eop/2005/B78.xls.

Andrew Bacevich

Andrew Bacevich’s new book is out (I haven’t read it yet, but I will).   I think that he is one of the wisest people we have in this country.  He is a conservative, a military man, author, thinker, and professor.  He was on Bill Moyers the other night — god bless NPR and Bill Moyers for making these appearances available on the web for those of us who cannot be in front of a TV at the precise time.  Linked at the Moyers site is the video of a lecture Professor Bacevich delivered late last year at Boston University.  One could do worse than read professor Bacevich’s books, his numerous columns that have appeared in various media outlets (a number can be found on the Boston Globe website and that of The American Conservative Magazine here and here), or spend an evening — as I just did — watching Bacevich in conversation on Moyers and in delivering his speech at BU.

Beside men like this, those who are running the country today are mere pigmies, morally and intellectually.

Although he has opposed the Iraq war, Bacevich’s family has a tradition of serving in the military.  Having already followed him for some time, I grieved when I read of his son’s death a little over a year ago in Iraq.  I did again as I saw the topic come up in the Moyers interview (the interview is in two parts, and it is about 20 minutes into the second part).  That he perseveres, that he continues as he does, with the wisdom, fortitude, and graciousness that he has, simply blows me away.

Fun with Global Warming

I spent way too much time commenting on a Houston Chronicle blog in the last couple of days … Is Global Warming for Real? Responses were exceptionally well behaved, and one might suppose this what one should expect, given that it is a blog on “Houston.Belief” or something like that, but there are religious/christian blogs where the discourse can be less than civil. Of course civility, or lack thereof, can be “read into” the way something is phrased in print and the lack of eye contact or body language can let the reader’s prejudices and predispositions about someone with a contrary point of view run wild. That didn’t seem to happen here; for my part I certainly hope that I was civil enough.

A couple of observations: The responders on the blog seemed to be mostly evangelical Christians of one sort or another (this is a group that I can no longer claim to adhere to, but one that I think I can understand, at least a bit anyway, because of my personal history, and that I would like to think that I can have a decent conversation with as well). As a group the responders seemed to be, with an exception or two, most definitely in the skeptic (with regard to anthropogenic global warming — AGW) or even denial camp. The caveat, of course, is that this is a self selected and unscientific sample of the evangelical community and may in no way be representative of it.

I am reminded of the movie Jesus Camp which I viewed in Sunday School last summer. One image that stuck with me was a scene where some children who were on their way to “Jesus Camp” were being home schooled. Now the topic that a “secular liberal” (like me?) would assume would be presented in a home school science class would be something on creationism or its latter day manifestation, Intelligent Design (some wry scientists & others insist on a “sic” after the word “Intelligent”, but that is another discussion, and its not about the believers, but about the presumed object of belief). Not so, however. The mom was teaching her children about the falsity of climate change and global warming.

In the blog mentioned above I asserted an analogy between evolution/creation and AGW/AGW-denial. In each case there is a constituency whose ox is being gored by the scientific consensus. In the former it is the religious fundamentalists and their particular, restrictive (and unnecessary from the hermeneutic point of view) interpretation of Genesis, and on the other it is (at least from the point of view of the enabling funding) energy companies (although the number appears to be decreasing). What is REALLY interesting, I think, is that there is not nearly as direct a theological connection between AGW-denial and religious conservatism as there is between evolution-denial and religious conservatism. The only thing I can come up with is that a fundamentalist might be substantially predisposed to believe in a “young earth”, which if the “young” is young enough, would require him to deny the validity of the paleoclimate data (ice cores go back 800,000 years, further than most “young earthers” can go). Global warming would therefore have to be, like evolution, a hoax of some sort.

However there is more than one passage that anticipates the earth will ultimately be destroyed by fire and “fervent heat” (a phrase from the KJV, as I recall). In my boyhood many preachers found passages such as these anticipating the future of a nuclear holocaust. Thankfully that hasn’t happened (yet). Why can’t the dangers of a human induced hot earth be compatible with these passages as well? (I’m serious here, really. Apocalypticists have, in my lifetime, shifted quit agilely from Russia or a ruler of a unified European Union as the anti-Christ precipitating Armageddon, to Saddam Hussein, to Mr. Ahmadinejad, as seemed fitting with the political crisis of the day. Potential natural or human induced catastrophes should be equally adaptable to serve theological ends).

In fact, this — e.g., compatibility between apocalypticism and global warming — hasn’t happened. I’m running out of energy and time, so here’s a suggestion of one reason why. The religious right is aligned to an unprecedented extent with the Republican Party (well, Duh!), a coalition which includes secular right wingers (I don’t like to use the word “conservative” because I consider myself one in several aspects) and moneyed constituencies. The latter are fewer in number than the religious, but they have an agenda of their own, one of which has been to fight off the notion of global warming, mainly because it has serious implications for the way they do business. The religious types, much greater in number, have the votes. So part of the deal has been to get the notion of global warming, or rather its denial, on the plate of the religious. That this has occurred is pretty obvious, it seems to me. The scene from “Jesus Camp” is evidence of this, assuming that it was “typical” of what religious home-schoolers today are taught (I really don’t know, and the producers of Jesus Camp could very well have “cherry picked” the home school topics; someone could research this, and probably has). Other evidence, of course, is the hostility of the James Dobsons and Richard Lands of this world, experts all in this area, to the notion of Global Warming.

Conservative religion of my boyhood in the 50s and 60s was at least as conservative (theologically) as it is today; however, it was accompanied by a (very healthy) skepticism about political alliances, something that has all but disappeared in the evangelical camp. Politics has a substantial influence over the social agenda of the religious right; issues are chosen that are likely to energize and get out the voters (boy is this a new idea). Thus, cultural/”tribal” prejudices can be more of an influence on these issues than actual words of scripture (e.g., Cultural/Tribal: we now have annual “battles” in the “war on Christmas, a festival that the Puritans, somewhat religious themselves, were reputed to detest; e.g., vs. Scriptural:  how anyone can read the words of Jesus about prayer in the Sermon on the Mount, and be the least concerned about supposed prohibition of public prayer in the schools or anywhere else is beyond me).

Perhaps I’ll add to this later …

Iranian Warning: Bush has a history

The New York Review of Books (on my list of the five best magazines/periodicals in English) has an article on line discussing the situation with Iran (Iran, The Threat, by Thomas Powers).  Even as the Bush administration threatens to destroy the world of my children with its denial of the global warming threat — I agree with James Hansen, the evidence is such that the active deniers in business and politics are criminals, de facto if not de jure — it moves recklessly and needlessly in a direction that could finish off our own.

Months ago the National Intelligence Estimate refuted the Bush administration’s insistence on imminence of Iran’s obtaining a nuclear weapon, and for a period it seemed that this had taken the wind out of the sails of Dick and George.  But more recently the administration has ratcheted up its rhetoric again.  As if the country should still be taking seriously the pronouncements of an administration whose comprehension of international reality brought us thousands of deaths, many more thousands of casualties, a mounting war debt the total of which recedes into the stratosphere, ignominy and disgrace in most countries of the world, all in order to show that there were no WMDs after all.  That some 20% of the voters (God help us) still support the Bush regime is a sad fact that will probably remain as long as our race abides, but that neither of the two opposition Democratic candidates seriously appose the Cheney/Bush view of Iran’s nuclear capabilities and intent is a distressing fact.

Powers, a regular author in the NYRB, shakes his head:

At a moment of serious challenge, battered by two wars, ballooning debt, and a faltering economy, the United States appears to have lost its capacity to think clearly.

As if it were morally justified in launching yet another preemptive attack on a sovereign nation, the United States Army is already tied down and stretched to the breaking point in Iraq and Afghanistan.  Any militarily effective action against Iran would have to be undertaken by the Air Force or the Navy, with the nod most likely going to the former.  Bombing would have to suffice (an oft used tactic in the United States continuing effort to win the hearts and minds of the world’s citizens), and the targets are not exactly in the open desert with bulls eyes painted on them.  Indeed some of our most forward thinking leaders advocated using nuclear weapons on dug in Iranian nuclear facilities, until a few years ago when the military simply put its foot down.

Indeed, it has not been the Democratic opposition which has slowed the progress to yet another aggressive attack by the Bush administration, but the military itself.  Admiral Fallon, who recently resigned after getting a bit too much notoriety in an Esquire profile, famously said that we would not attack Iran on his watch. Unfortunately, we are no longer on his watch; however, Powers indicates that Defense Secretary Gates seems to have taken on Fallon’s attitude of moderation.

The Bush administration continues to see the world, and the world of the Middle East, through a particular lens, interpreting efforts of others to arm themselves as threats to the West and their neighbors, rather than the equally plausible possibility that they are concerned about being attacked in their turn by the United States.  Powers makes the point that none of the countries currently in possession of nuclear weapons have been attacked, nor have they used those weapons.  This is a fact that cannot be lost on the Iranian government, which has been at cross purposes with the United States for over 30 years, and some time ago lost the convenience of the Soviet Union being the major concern of the United States.

As the Bush administration winds down, there is very little evidence that the “facts on the ground” have changed its view of reality — Lord knows, with people like Krauthammer, Gerson, & the like being paid good money to independently reinforce their delusional view of the world, it is a frustrating time — and we are not out of the woods yet.

From one point of view the answer [to the question, does Bush have the power to carry out his continuing threats against Iran?] seems obvious. It is too late. With the exception only of the neoconservative faithful, every close observer of the American–Iranian standoff says that the administration’s threats are empty, that the United States does not have the military resources, or the political support at home, or the agreement of allies abroad, to carry out a full-scale air attack on Iran’s nuclear infrastructure, much less to invade and occupy the country. Two of the skeptics, Gates and Mullen, are running the Pentagon, and their cautioning remarks, only a step this side of insubordination, would seem to make attack impossible. But if attack is impossible, why does Bush talk himself into an ever-tighter corner by continuing to issue threats? Does he believe Iran will cave? Are these the only words he thinks people will still listen to? Is he hoping to tie the hands of the next president? Or is he preparing to summon the power of his office to carry out the last option on the table? One hardly knows whether to take the question seriously. It seems alarmist and overexcited even to pose it when the realities are so clear. But it is impossible to be sure—Bush has a history.

Dobson’s comments

James Dobson has blessed the world with his views on Obama. Some evangelical Christians are criticising his characterization of Obama’s views.  Not enough, however.

It’s hard for me to say anything civil about someone like Dobson, particularly when he conflates Christianity and his particular political views.  I started out as a Southern Baptist, and have spent the 60+ years of my life struggling to retain the good from that in the face of my growth in knowledge of the Bible, history, and the world.  My scientific career has been in both industry and academia, and my growth in understanding the world through my profession has been “faith” affirming, or at least “faith” allusive, in sense that Abraham Heschel suggested (with the caveat that a “literalistic” reading of the Bible simply does not work, but that is o.k.).

That said, what “faith” I still have after 60 years remains in spite of, rather than because of, people like Dobson and the movement he represents.  In fact, the antics of the religious right during the last couple of decades have been the most faith-killing thing I have experienced (I am angry, very angry, and my emotions may be distorting my view of reality, but so be it).

Maybe we could say that if the writings of someone like Bart Ehrman have made me skeptical of the inspiration of the scriptures (whatever that means), the actions of the religious right have likewise rendered me skeptical of the supposed transforming power of the words of scripture.  The disciple of Jesus is to bring light to the world.  I see mostly darkness coming from the religious movement Dobson so enthusiastically represents, but maybe it’s just me.  I have no use for him; to attempt to articulate anything about him or people like him usually leaves me spluttering in frustration.

Two videos on the internet

A book interview wit Barack Obama on CSpan. This was before he declared as a candidate. For me it was clear that he was/is one of the most intelligent politicians to come along in a long, long time.

An appearance at Google before the end of the primaries. “Part of my job as the next president is to break the fever of fear that has been exploited by this administration. We’re told that we should be afraid of terrorists, and immigrants, and each other, and it becomes the means by which our civil liberties are distorted, our values are distorted, we start hearing our attorney general nominee not being certain as to whether simulated drownings are torture … that’s not who we are as Americans. Sometimes I’m accused of being this progressive, far-out …. I’m conservative, in the sense that I want us to get back to those values that were essential to building America.”

I have no respect — none, zilch — for the political points of view of anyone who repeats uncritically the innuendo that they have heard or seen on right wing talk radio, or Fox News, or the “he said, she said” cable programs. Don’t elect him … fine. But don’t elect him because you have some principles which he clearly has denounced. (You would have to favor war and torture to do that, but go ahead.) But don’t do so because he’s black, or because his middle name is Hussein, or because he knows shady characters, or because he’s been to a muslim country. Don’t insult, degrade, and profane your citizenship by doing it for that reason.