Nationally and internationally, old authorities are crumbling. No less of a luminary than the Secretary of the Treasury said a few days ago that capitalism is changing. The rug has been yanked out from under the financial experts and captains of industry. Political alignments are shifting as old orthodoxies die in favor of new realities. Entire industries are fading away never to return, along with their cultural markes and mores.  We are shedding the skin of our latest decades-old national identity, and not sure what our new one is.

And the church has not been left untouched by this upheaval. I’m not sure what’s floating around out there in the ol’ Jungian subconscious, but I’ve had several different, unbidden, and related encounters that I’m mulling and have yet to condense into a coherent signpost to anything. Here are my bits and bobs, presented straight with no commentary.

Michael Spencer, proprietor of InternetMonk.com, in an article in the Christian Science Monitor:

We are on the verge – within 10 years – of a major collapse of evangelical Christianity. This breakdown will follow the deterioration of the mainline Protestant world and it will fundamentally alter the religious and cultural environment in the West.

Within two generations, evangelicalism will be a house deserted of half its occupants. (Between 25 and 35 percent of Americans today are Evangelicals.) In the “Protestant” 20th century, Evangelicals flourished. But they will soon be living in a very secular and religiously antagonistic 21st century.

This collapse will herald the arrival of an anti-Christian chapter of the post-Christian West. Intolerance of Christianity will rise to levels many of us have not believed possible in our lifetimes, and public policy will become hostile toward evangelical Christianity, seeing it as the opponent of the common good.

Millions of Evangelicals will quit. Thousands of ministries will end. Christian media will be reduced, if not eliminated. Many Christian schools will go into rapid decline. I’m convinced the grace and mission of God will reach to the ends of the earth. But the end of evangelicalism as we know it is close.

Andrew Sullivan, editor of The Atlantic, wrote a post called “Clinging To The Wreckage” yesterday:

In the last decade, I realize that many of my most cherished institutions have failed – and failed in ways that are not trivial. Perhaps the institution dearest to me, the Catholic church, greeted the emergence of gay people in a way that never truly reflected the compassion of Jesus or the good faith arguments many of us offered as a way forward. This was sad to me, but not life-changing. I know the Holy Spirit takes time, as James Allison reminds us. But then came the sex abuse crisis. Like many others, the truth about the evil in the heart of the church, and the cooptation and enabling of that evil, and the refusal to take real responsibility for the evil, simply left me gasping for air. I realize now that my Catholic identity never recovered, even if my faith endures in a far more modest and difficult way.

And a reader responded:

…I raised three children in the Church and its elementary and secondary schools and none seem to have any interest in its increasingly bland liturgies, meddling in politics, and assertive clericalism.  My own wife, a product of a particularly superstitious strain of Irish Catholicism, the other day pronounced the Church’s dogmas on priestly celibacy and the ordination of female priests “ridiculous”.  I fear that soon I will be sitting in the pew alone, my wife busy elsewhere.  Just another middle-aged parishioner in a rapidly aging congregation, listening to an ancient priest rebuke the moral laxity of certain “young people” who would never be caught dead at one of his homilies.

Rainn Wilson (aka. Dwight Schrute on the sitcom The Office) is Ba’hai, and has started a site called Soul Pancake. Why? From his introductory video:

I’m sick of spirituality being airy-fairy, hippy-dippy, and precious. I want to have a debate about life’s big questions. I want to de-lame-ify talking about God and religion. Soul Pancake is where spiritality and creativity meet. Want to join us?

Me, a couple of nights ago. I had a dream that I was back at Mars Hill Church – a local church in Seattle where I served as worship leader and a kind of arts experimentor/integrator along with a number of others. I was talking with two friends – Brad and Luke – both of who are reasonable people in real life, but who were acting like massive a-holes in our conversation: defending the church’s fundamentalist theology with arrogant dismissiveness. At first I couldn’t respond to them. My throat felt thick and my jaw locked up so that I talked like I had some kind of advanced Parkinsons – that dreamlike helpless state. But I was so indignant, enraged by what I was hearing that with massive effort I forced out a rebuttal. I think I partially woke myself up doing it because I went into a lighter sleep where my tongue was loosened. We verbally battled, and I felt a surge of passionate, insightful, important arguments against their behavior and assumptions come flooding out in a boiling river of indictments.

It was only after I woke up a bit that I realized the dream wasn’t personal to either the church or my friends. They were a stand-in for my life’s worth of Evangelical experience with its thickheadedness, divisiveness, selective factual amnesia, disconnect from the past, arrogant posturing, and all of the rest, delivered by friendly, engaging and compelling people in an infuriating mix of always-hoped-for, but never realized, promise and possibility. I told Janece that the dream was very much about me feeling betrayed in a very painful, personal way.

Thoughts?

We begin with a video from St. Stephen of Colbert (snatched from the jaws of the Ordinary Gentlemen blog):

In this clip, St. Colbert does an intro about how church attendance swells during severe recessions and then interviews Fr. James Martin, a Jesuit who joined the order and took a vow of poverty after leaving what sounds like a very lucrative position at GE Finance. Here’s a snippet of their exchange at the end:

FM: If you tie yourself to your possessions, your possessions start owning you. I think it’s more about freedom. The vow of poverty that we Jesuits have taken is more about being free, following Christ, being free to serve other people, and also identifying with and having compassion with the poor. So it’s mostly about freedom… It’s more that we keep God at bay. we have these defenses – our status, our possessions, things we hold on to – and when they’re not there anymore, it’s easier for God to break in.

SC: He [God] says “I am He whom thou seekest.”

FM: It’s not that God is any more present, it’s that we’re just more open…

In the comments a few posts ago about winter, Bob and Stephen had this to say:

Bob: Today I am seeing in the mirror’s reflection a man visibly marked with earth and ashes – a man more humbled than yesterday, a man reminded of the winter of his soul, the chaos of what he is when left to his own devices, the breakdown of his character and values through the press of daily living, and… the hope for renewal that Springs forth new every Easter.

Stephen: Every winter is an invitation by Nature (one of the many faces of God) to look directly at oneself without the gloss of external delight available in other seasons to protect the eye from itself. While this may be painful, to look deeply and steadily is to become free from the monkey mind — it is no more complicated than that.

Lent is a type of forced spiritual winter for the layman – a season of willingly administered want, searching, scrounging, exposure to a vast, cold, clear-eyed truth with an aching soul. For a culture like ours, suckled from the moment of our births and hounded to the last of our days by the largely unconscious assumption that we can and should have everything we crave when we crave it and that it’s a fact of life that we will be stroked and prodded in almost every waking minute to crave things we didn’t know about when we woke up that day, the idea of Lent is ridiculous. Why deprive yourself of anything when there is no need? Lent, shallowly understood, is just another easy to stereotype example of self-flagellating religious folk who can’t, and determinedly won’t, have a good time and “enjoy life”.

I think what Fr. Martin, Bob and Stephen all point to is the necessity of the Lent experience, especially in Western life as we know it. Whether it is adopted by choice or forced on us by times of want, deprivation or intentional withdrawal from our craving and automatic pleasures has the paradoxical effect of creating room for delight and discovery in our lives.

By inserting lack and want, it hones our senses and makes our pleasure palate more sensistive and discriminating. By eliminating the frenetic buzz of searching for and consuming what we crave, it creates a keen stillness and strengthens our ability to wait and observe. By compelling us to sit shiva on our self-righteousness and gaze silently and steadily on our weaknesses, failures and small and large cruelties (and our subsequent shame and overcompensations), it opens a cathedral in our shadowed soul that is filled with the ever-present light, compassion and generosity of God.

I read a fascinating post on Slog the other day. They’ve been doing a series on jobs people have taken after losing their old lives to this Great Recession (as some call it). In one post, “Chastity”, a former technical writer (and a great writer in general), is talking about her experience in her new role as a part-time porn production assistant. After overseeing a shoot where five couples copulate in various ways in front of a live studio audience, she writes these fascinating words:

Most surprising to me is that the some of the girls who do this work very regularly seem to have their fuses blown out, sexually. There isn’t much they won’t do, but they never orgasm. Not really, anyway — and they’ll cheerfully announce this fact when the cameras aren’t rolling. Nor do they frequently have sex at home. For those who actively choose sex work, this creeping sexual numbness seems to me the greatest tragedy of this way of making money. The loss of my desire would provoke a fundamental shift in my character — my sexuality is my sixth sense. The sensual and the erotic make up a considerable portion of my interior life: they are private — to put them on display would be to capitalize on my most fragile and vulnerable self. The irony, however, is that for me to work in this business, I have to be a little numb, too.
…
I can’t shake the conviction that pornography is exploitation, however much everyone involved insists it isn’t. As long as it remains the last viable resort for a young woman, I don’t know how it can be anything else, and I don’t know how I can be anything other than complicit in Jenny’s eventual sexual anesthesis.

(Read the entire post.)

When I read this, I was reminded of a quote by Frederich Buechner:

Lust is the craving for salt of a man dying of thirst.

Porn, like all human sexuality, is a complex topic (one I’d love to write on and one that, given my new employer is a Christian-based company, I’m not sure I’m feel free to be bluntly honest about). But what struck me about “Chastity’s” vignette is that how these sensitive physical, emotional and spiritual organs at the edge of our human experience – sex, appetite, the instincts for belonging and approval, security and safety, a framework of meaning – get scraped raw or blunted or even hopelessly damaged by a habitual, unthinking aquiescence to our own cravings.

The Lenten season is an antidote to that slow poison of numbness, just as winter is Nature’s antidote to the exertions of spring and summer. We must contract, let our concealing foliage and fineries fall away to reveal the contours of our internal landscape, so that the warm light of God’s benevolence can begin to tease out the new life of roots and seeds that have long been hidden and dormant.

More from the “Truth Will Set Us All Free” dept: What a sad, sad saga this Ted Haggard thing is. Right on the heels of the Prop 8 debacle, the nation gets an object lesson in the destructive poison of being gay, closeted, and Christian. It’s a familiar story to anyone who’s read anything about the experience of gay Christians, but it never gets any easier to watch:

The convolutions, the intrigue, the lies, the lost money, the ruined reputations and careers and hopes, the breathless media exposes — all of that would have never happened if Ted had been free enough to admit at some point, early on, three simple words: “I am gay.” A tragedy.

Charles hates penguins: “Yes, there is no love in me for penguins. The creatures have a life cycle that is utterly stupid and tedious.” Charles also hates dogs and thinks his daughter, age 7, should know whether or not her childhood is successful so far. Poor sad Charles.

Our new President does more for US-Muslim relations in 20 minutes than his predecessor did in 8 years:

Competence. It’s a bit hard to adjust to so suddenly. Obama chose to give his first, highly sought-after, high visibility televised interview as President to Al Arabiya. The interviewer, Hisham Melehm, who I’ve followed and been impressed by on the Diane Rehm Show as a frequent guest, was impressed, and so was Wolf Blitzer:

BLITZER: He can be a pretty charming guy. Is that what you think?

MELHEM: He — absolutely, absolutely. But, you know, you realize, you’re sitting from a man who has a deep, keen intellect, a sharp analytical mind, supple intelligence. And the way he weaves things, the way he frames issues, whether he’s talking about terrorism, talking about different cultures, he has a very sophisticated understanding of the world…

BLITZER: You know these issues and the region as well as anyone. You’ve been covering this story for a long time. Will he succeed?

MELHEM: Look, already he is sending the right vibes, the right tone, there is a different approach, there is a different wind coming from Washington, different discourse. In terms of a radical shift, it’s too early to say.

He is waiting for the Israeli elections, as you well know. He is waiting for the Iranian election, as you well know. He is sending the right signals at this stage. And I think he will — is going to force people in the Middle East to listen to him and take him very seriously and to listen to him carefully.

BLITZER: I think you’re absolutely right. And as someone who also has covered this region for a long time, he spoke with authority and knowledge. He clearly knew what he was talking about…

MELHEM: Absolutely.

As Steve Clemons puts it:

Barack Obama’s first moves have been uttlerly brilliant…

His style matters — just like Bush’s swagger did — and it is this act of humility towards the Muslim world which may animate hope in the nations around the world and in the Middle East specifically.

Everyone will have to adjust now. The Saudis will leave the peace deal on the table. The Israelis have to remake themselves — even if Netanyahu succeeds Olmert. Hamas will have to find a way to become differently postured — if not on Israel, then at least on some level of international acceptability with American partners. Arab stakeholders are going to have to snap out of positions shaped more by status quo thinking and inertia that things will never change and get with the Obama program.

What Obama did has provided a new punctuation point in American foreign policy, and it is not “continuous” foreign policy at all. This is a new game and a very impressive new leader.

President Obama – GOP punching bag or black-belt rope-a-dope master? The President has been getting a lot of flack from his left flank for not using his sky-high popularity (60% approval rating in Alabama… Alabama!) and a decisive Dem majority to muscle through his agenda instead of taking the time to make a charm offensive to the party that landed us in this horrible mess. It’s a valid complaint. After all, it’s clear after 6 years of Republican hegemony that they have little to offer but bad faith and bad ideas, and the public wants a 180-degree switch from the last eight years. So, why all the effort by Obama and his staff on a fool’s errand?

Al Giordano, making more sense than most of the hysterical liberals I’ve been reading, thinks Obama is basically continuing the political tactics that had him sail past the mighty Clintons and McCain in the elections – define the playing field by taking an early crucial lead in rhetoric, planning and actions, reach out with very politically visible (and genuine) offers to work together, lay back when the inevitable attacks begin, and then yank the political rug out from underneath at the most visible moment to come back for the win.

For a new president with such enormous public popularity to set up Congressional Republicans to be perceived as slapping his “outstretched hand” was a chess move that suckered them into the tar pit of being seen as the obstructionists in Washington, and at that, they’re now branded as additionally inactive on “the urgency of the economic situation”…

In other words, Obama’s strategy is to set them up for another rout in the 2010 Congressional elections and to hasten, in the meantime, the process by which they wake up and realize their seats are vulnerable. The President doesn’t need their votes on the Stimulus (therefore, this maneuver is not about the Stimulus, but more akin to a football team calling a running play to set up a later passing play). The truth is that so many Congressional Democrats are so undependable that Obama will need some Republican votes later on other legislative priorities, particularly in the Senate in order to get 60 votes for “cloture” to allow bills to be voted up or down: On the Employee’s Free Choice Act, on Immigration Reform (and now he needs one more to offset the anti-immigrant junior Democratic Senator from New York), on children’s health care and much, much more. To get to that point, he has to make individual Republicans feel vulnerable at the ballot box to Democratic challenge. Today’s events are speeding that process up.

In the end, Obama’s “bipartisanship” is one of the most Machiavellian partisan maneuvers we’ve seen in Washington in a long while, and I use that description in its most admirable context. The Republicans fell right into the trap today. Progressives that urge Obama to be more “partisan” should pay close attention to how the GOP is getting pwned before falling into the same trap themselves.

Here’s Obama in his own words on his political style:

Reason #1072 why I like Esquire – Tom Junod:

And so give this to global warming: It’s another test case. Because over the last eight years — since our president rejected the Kyoto Protocol in March 2001 — what we’ve done with global warming is what we’ve done with the war on terror and the war in Iraq and the authorization and outsourcing of torture and the creation of a security state and the creation of an insecurity state, in terms of the marketplace: We’ve lived with it. We’ve gotten really good at living with things during the Bush Years, at tolerating the intolerable. And while this may sound like another tip of the hat to the incredible resilience of the American people, it’s not: Resilience, after all, is not what’s required in crisis when the crisis is partly of your own making. Responsibility is. We have heard of the Tech Bubble of the Clinton Years, the Housing Bubble of George W. Bush. Well, the bubble that we’re living in now — still — is the bubble that’s all our own. It’s the Moral Bubble, and it will not be pricked until we take responsibility not just for the forty-third president’s actions but for our inaction — for all the agreements we’ve made without awareness, for all the awareness we’ve come to without vigilance, for all the times we’ve touched the easy, insulating button of our assent.

~ from his article “What The Hell Just Happened?” in the Feb 2009 issue of Esquire, italics mine

So, I was going to write a short response to Bob’s comment about my take on Rick Warren’s invocation at the Inauguration, but as usual it spiraled out of control into an almost 700 word behemoth that began to demand it’s own post. So here it is…

Like the other pastors, Warren was given the daunting task of delivering a religious invocation to a huge, vastly diverse audience on such an auspicious occasion, and he did a respectable job. After getting a little distance from the Inauguration Warren’s prayer wore a little better than it did in the moment of delivery. In fact, the transcript reads even better (read it here). But it still didn’t sit well.

For one thing, the delivery bugged me. Obama, who admittedly is a phenomenal public speaker, delivers his lines without excess drama and verbal frippery. His tone is commanding without needing to verbally wheedle or bully. And both Robinson and Lowery also played it straight, with an authenticity and conviction to their verbal phrasing. This isn’t just a style issue – I believe that style has a direct link to the internal cultural attenuation of the speaker.

With that in mind, the practiced, overly nice, melifluous bedside manner of mainstream Evangelical preachers makes me itch because it reflects the church culture they work in – one where they have to verbally work overtime to hide the rough words and rough edges, never ruffle feathers with parishoners or jeopardize their building projects, never cross the denominational leadership on which their careers depend, hide the culturally unacceptable parts of their belief structure and sell the “God is my BFF (best friend forever) type of faith” (as the commenter put it) that makes it easier to attract new attendees. Evangelical preachers feel caught between God’s watchful eye (no compromise on beliefs), their parishoners (who don’t want the boat to be rocked), the world (with whom they have a combined persecution/inferiority complex), and their career in the public spotlight (which demands they always be relevant and interesting). So, they largely adopt this non-strident, uninvasive, undemanding listenable style that has the simultaneous effect of both inducing a warm fuzzy feeling while insuring that their time on stage is instantly forgettable.

Second, for all of Warren’s talk of “failing to treat our fellow human beings…with the respect they deserve”, he, along with many Evangelicals, continue to equate gays and gay marriage with incest and pedophilia and was a vocal supporter of Prop 8 which threatens to dissolve the marriages of tens of thousands of deliriously happy gay folk using the disingenous and untrue reasoning that it threatened the right of churches and pastors to free speech. I believe him when he says that he has gay friends, and people like Melissa Etheridge have spoken of him warmly. But treating people with respect means sticking to the facts, to the truth, and these kinds of overstatements continue to inflame the discourse with their obvious untruths. And it’s made somehow more infuriating by the can’t-we-all-just-get-along style it’s delivered in (see point 1).

Look, I like Evangelicals. I have friends who are Evangelicals. Their charitable giving, hard work and general hand of friendship (especially in the individual vs. church setting) resists the demonization they get from the culture. But I can say from an experienced perspective that their culture and worldview has serious problems that are driving a wedge deeper and deeper between them and the world at large. They’re not dumb – they can feel this happening and I can sense the general pessimism that they feel about it – but they are locked into a theological worldview that makes the deepening separation and resulting irrelevance inevitable.

So, I stand by my comments on Warren being the weakest of the three, and I think the comment I reference in the post captured (in much less bloviation than mine) the essence of why. As for being civil, I’m not personally attacking Warren or casting aspersions on his character. I’m pointing out from my own experience and as authentically as I can what I feel the flaws are in his culture, the culture that I grew up in. I get passionate about it, I mention it, because I still care. If I didn’t, I wouldn’t spend any time on it because I wouldn’t care, y’know?

My friend Sky has sent a couple of emails recently with little vignettes from his daughter, Ave (who’s about 6 months older than Amira). The most recent goes like this:

Ave, Isai and I were in the car last night, waiting for Anita to come out of Safeway. It was dark, rainy, and Ave was quite for a long time. And then Ave said:

“Daddy… is God playing us?”

“What do you mean, Lovebird?”

Ave starts moving her hands around in the air and says, “is God ‘playing us’, like in a game when you play?”

“Uh… uh… that’s a very interesting question, Lovebird…”

“He’s moving us like we’re pieces, with His hands… I think that’s how it is.”

Silence.

“Daddy, God can do anything because He has power. But His power is love.”

Sky’s family is Orthodox Christian, and I think they attend church a couple of times during a week. Sky is also a very well-read man and has a knack for intuiting and translating complex spiritual concepts. It’s clear that Ave is developing robust 4-year-old language for God and the way the spiritual world works.

In contrast, we talk almost never in our little family about God, except for mealtime and bedtime prayers where we thank Jesus for food and the days activities respectively. Amira for the first time this year watching “The Little Drummer Boy” Christmas video and looking at our Nativity heard “Jesus” in context with “little baby Jesus”, although that was the extent. She really has no context for the prayers we do together beyond it being a family ritual, and she has no concept of a spiritual world that is different than pretend, different than what you can see with your eyes. She has no real spiritual literacy.

I’m torn about this.

On one hand, I feel pretty spiritually disconnected. It’s been several years since I attended a church, and although I emerged with some dear friends, my experience with it was decidedly mixed. When I first started blogging again this year, I felt gung-ho about being a worship leader of some kind. Now, not so much. Just this past week we’ve had eight people in our immediate circle tell us how badly they were, and are still, being battered and wounded by the church and Christians to the point that they’ve completely withdrawn, and that’s not counting many others over the last few years. The foundations of my belief, such as they are, feel adolescent, flimsy, illogical, scientifically wobbly. I feel like without being immersed in activities with like-minded religious folk to shore up my emotional surety, I can’t feel emphatic about what I believe. The things I would die for don’t include my religion.

On the other hand, I’ve lost none of my hunger and enthusiasm for spiritual talk and learning. It’s as much a part of my makeup as ever. I remain convinced of God, even as I have absolutely no idea what to do with that information. In a conversation with my brother a few nights ago, I didn’t feel at all vibey with the kind of Universal Consciousness religious synthesis he has come to and found myself still arguing in favor of more specific religious practice (the paradoxes of Jesus in particular), even while feeling a complete lack of religious commitment. I believe in the spiritual world, and right now I feel like I know less about it than I ever have.

I think Janece shares a lot of that ambivalence. One of her good friends from when they were in Christian high school together, who’s now come out as gay and got a drubbing from her family and the church, has been in spiritual recovery at a Unitarian church and has been liking it. I think her experience resonates with Janece.

So, lacking strong conviction about what we believe, we’ve ended up not saying much at all to Amira. We continue our practice with her of giving thanks for food and life, because we believe that gratitude is vital. She has some great books about caring for our world and caring for others as a way to express God’s love. And… well, that’s it.

I don’t want Amira growing up in a typical evangelical environment, and other forms of Christianity have their own problems. I feel it’s vital to give her a spiritual structure, but not one she’s going to have to deal with later as a negative like Janece and I have. Janece and I still have some exploring and searching to do to build a solid conviction about what we believe and in the meantime, I don’t want Amira’s spiritual literacy to suffer. I believe in belief, in the power of having spiritual vocabulary and distinctions, to put the sensory world and culture into right perspective.

So, a little help. If you have kids, what did you teach them? Do you feel like your church (if you attend) gives them everything they need, or do you find yourself modifying/qualifying what they learn? If you don’t subscribe to a religion, do you teach them about spirituality, and if so, how? What should Janece and I be reading on this subject that could help guide us?

Somebody stop me! I can’t stop writing!

One quick word about this Warren/Obama flap:

I completely get the gay/liberal community’s outrage at Warren giving the invocation. It’s a very prestigious and visible spot on an historical occasion. I think they’re justified, and I would never presume to tell them they’re out of line by saying this is a mistake, especially on the heels of the Prop 8 debacle. I hope that this further motivates them to put pressure on Obama to carry through on his campaign promises to the GLBT community.

That said, having come from an Evangelical background, I can’t feel the outrage as much. Warren is much more stylistically progressive than many of the characters that have inhabited the pulpits at churches I’ve attended, and I fully get his sincerity when he says he “loves the gays”. I’m sure he does, even as he baffles and outrages that community with his overheated analogies. In my experience, Evangelicals as individuals tend to come through and shine when the chips are down and someone needs to be taken care of, even though as a group politically they act like spiritual bulls in a china shop and are on the losing side of the struggle for hearts and minds on this issue.

And that said, I also am amazed at the sense of liberals feeling betrayed by Obama. The guy has been nothing if not consistent in this transition in his pledge to bring the “civil” back into civil debate. He didn’t punish Lieberman, he’s reached out to McCain, he’s made pragmatic choices to ensure maximum good governance, stocking his cabinet with Dems and Reps, and now – surprise! – he’s reaching out to both sides again by bookending his inauguration ceremony with Warren, representing millions of progressive-leaning Evangelicals, and Lowery, a civil rights leader in full support of gay marriage. As a liberal, its seems to me that if you’re going to be outraged about Warren, then you should be stoked to the same degree about Lowery – a preacher unapologetically supporting gay equality as a civil rights leader with moral cred and who is taking the message to blacks, a community with notorious antipathy to being gay.

Obama’s making a simple statement: we’ve all got to stretch a little to push forward together in the places where we agree. As Frank Schaeffer, son of the famous Evangelical Francis Schaeffer, says in HuffPost:

I’m pro-Obama, pro-gay rights. I’m a former once burned, twice shy, ex-evangelical, son of a founder of the Religious Right, now a writer excoriated by the right as a traitor. And Let me tell you why Obama is — again — wiser than his critics in picking Warren to pray at the inauguration…

Unlike his lefty critics lamenting Obama’s ideological impurity, the President-elect is actually positioning himself to help gay rights. That is because he is going to actually govern, not stand on the sidelines complaining. As such he needs to do all he can to soothe the idiots, when it comes to the tough social/political issues that are the residue of 30 years of culture wars.

In inviting Warren, President-elect Obama is sending a signal that as President he is going to stick with resolve to doing the tough things when it comes to using some political capital on behalf of the gay community. He knows symbols are important and is softening the blow for the vast number of evangelicals to whom Warren is a hero.

The whole post is worth a read, and I completely agree. And, I hope this gives this the GLBT community more impetus to continue to engage and put pressure on PE Obama to deliver on his promises.

Bob, welcome back. To you and Stephen and Maria, I appreciate the questions and the mental pause they gave me to consider beyond just my raw heartbreak, sadness and frustration.

Bob, you asked:

…at what point after the 9/11 attacks was a line crossed by Pres. Bush that constitutes the ‘moral failure’ of which you speak? Is it at the point of lifting the Geneva Convention rules, or is it at some other place?

I’m going to be blunt in saying that I don’t think Bush had the personal moral foundation to even take office, much less make decisions of this gravity. My read on him before the election (including his mocking of Karla Faye Tucker’s execution among other things) and one that’s been vindicated a thousand times over since, is that he is a deeply unintrospective, unwise and unserious man. His moral landscape is a childish cartoon of black and white villans and heroes, and his willful refusal to deepen his own capacity for healthy adult ambiguity and wisdom predetermined, I think, both his vastly (almost criminally) incompetent leadership as well as the stain he inflicted on America in a new embrace of torture as official policy. He was, sitting in the most powerful office in the world with all of its pitfalls and pressures, a guaranteed moral time bomb.

That said, you asked about “the line”. Defining the line that has traditionally constrained America in protecting our security has been the heart of the issue all along – determining the right place to be in the murky clouds of interrogation methods, international agreements, urgency, what is legal, and above all, what is morally right. I’ve blogged about this dilemma for myself before:

The movie [Clear And Present Danger] is just OK, but it made me wonder about something that’s popped up for me a few times about Christianity and people who deal with violence on a regular basis as part of their work — CIA interrogators, special ops military personnel, spies, prison guards, undercover cops, etc. etc. This society we enjoy is preserved in a number of ways by people willing to engage in violence for the sake of protecting us. They provide a certain kind of safeguard for normal and nice people to enjoy their neighborly lives. I wonder how people in those professions manage to retain their connection with their Christianity. Is it possible to follow closely in the footsteps of Christ, be told in church that “if you’ve done it to one of the least of these, you’ve done it to me” and still work over a suspect until they talk or assasinate a target?

I don’t know the answer to that question, and it’s a huge issue to wrestle with on the scale of deciding the fate and security of a whole nation, especially in great uncertainty when the nation was wounded so visibly and deeply, as we were on 9/11. I found some great reading on this while thinking about my response:

First, a good example of what Ta-Nehisi calls “weak-sauce” – a jot and tittle argument by the National Review that the torture, humiliation and deaths were “legal” outside the Geneva Convention, and therefore somehow less abhorrent or justified, because the combatants were not state-sponsored. They completely sidestep any real evaluation of the human/spiritual/moral dimension involved, even though their editor makes a lot of loud-n-proud noise about being a conservative Catholic. (Note: The Review has been stubbornly and steadfastly almost 100% wrong over the last eight years as Bush cheerleaders — still! — so I feel completely comfortable writing them off just on that basis, much less the merits.)

Second, a much more thoughtful and compelling series of posts from the Atlantic’s (what a great magazine!) Ross Douthat, a conservative, trying to grapple with Bush’s legacy on this. The posts in order are here, here, here and here. He basically comes down to admitting that while presidents have had to give the order approving horrific acts, such as Truman ordering the atomic strikes on Japan, the Bush administration lacked similar justification, especially for how broad and aggressive the orders were to implement torture.

So, what do I think the line was, and where it was crossed? From a moral perspective, I think there were a few lines, crossed in several ways.

First, our national trust was breached when Bush made the decision to use 9/11 as a “fear lever” for any and every politicized overreach his administration could dream up – cloaking the GOP in an untouchable cloak of patriotism that silenced/dismissed dissent around foreign invasion, energy policy, and a host of other issues. Our nation was wounded, badly, on 9/11. We were full of rage and near panic. The Bush administration was exactly like those charlatan preachers that prey on the fears of seniors to bilk them of their money. We were afraid, we trusted, we were taken for a ride. That’s immoral behavior.

Second, the official decision to pursue traditional torture techniques like waterboarding was beyond the pale, and speaks, in my mind, to morally diseased motivation. This is especially true, given what we now know: torture just doesn’t work. This has been extensively verified, most notably by real, effective interrogators dealing with actual al Qaeda members in actual, “ticking time bomb” combat conditions. A simple review and enhancing the existing methods and safeguards would have been more than sufficient, but instead Cheney went back to Vietnam-era black ops programs as a starting point for our official policy. Why would you do that unless you had a predisposition to, at some level, wanting to be agressive, punitive, retaliatory – beyond the point of civil, reasonable policy or morality? Bush’s immorality is his unquestioning embrace of this mindset.

Third, the attempts at legal cover, obfuscation and even hubris around this new dark legacy of torture reveals premeditation – a need to justify something morally incorrect by either hiding it or daring the public to enact a consequence. From day one of this new policy, the White House employed its lawyers to cover its tracks in case of possible future attempts of war crimes, and pursued an Orwellian policy of redefinition of torture as something else not so hard to stomach. Piled on that, it harshly punished soldiers like Lynndie England as being “bad apples” for simply carrying out its own policy and attempted to silence and ruin the reputations of honorable soldiers like Captain Ian Fishback for whistleblowing. And as a final insult, Bush refuses to own any of it at practically the same time Cheney clearly states that he advocated waterboarding.

Put all this in context of it happening in a direct relationship with another human being. Obviously, there’s not a direct equivalence for nation states with personal human relationships, but these are human beings leading us and their decisions/motivations mean something morally. When you lose, or don’t have, the capacity as leader to make these decisions with some fear and trembling and some sense of taking responsibility, when you go to more lengths to protect yourself from legal action than you did to prevent someone from dying while being tortured, when you use the power of your office to persecute whistleblowers and proclaim your hubris because the protections it gives you – it is immoral and you are responsible.

I include Rick Warren in this list of let-downs because as a Christian leader in a very influential public position, he had the same duty to speak out as Nathan did to David about his crime against Bathsheba’s husband. I’ve heard numerous times in church from preachers like him that you have more of a duty to do this to leaders that loudly proclaim your same Christian faith, as Bush has often done. That he did not, and equivocated about it by saying “it never came up”, is a moral and spiritual failure. Extraordinary times call for extraordinary stances by our public leaders in all areas, and he, among many others, failed that test of moral leadership.

Stephen, in one sense, I take your response as true for the nation as a whole (especially about the financial crisis). As Ross Douthat says in his thought-provoking post:

But here, too, I have uncertainty, mixed together with guilt, about how strongly to condemn those involved – because in a sense I know that what they were doing was what I wanted to them to do…

But anyone who felt the way I felt after 9/11 has to reckon with the fact that what was done in our name was, in some sense, done for us – not with our knowledge, exactly, but arguably with our blessing. I didn’t get what I wanted from this administration, but I think you could say with some justification that I got what I asked for. And that awareness undergirds – to return to where I began this rambling post – the mix of anger, uncertainty and guilt that I bring to the current debate over what the Bush Administration has done and failed to do, and how its members should be judged.

But, to be clear, I never felt this way. Even immediately after 9/11, I felt scared by the where the collective rage and need for a pound of flesh was going to take us as a nation, especially given our leadership at the time. We, as a nation, wrote Bush a blank check and he bankrupted us. But I, and many others, were outspoken about our concerns all through this even through a lot of push-back from our conservative friends and family, and I feel no need to step back from taking our leadership to task. In this one case, I was right, and those who felt the same were right and are justified in our outrage now.

I would counter that to force responsibility on these leaders when they will not accept it for themselves is engagement. We as a national community, need to find a way to complete the narrative of the last eight years in a way that establishes the rule of law and decency for the future – whether its Nuremburg-lite, a special prosecutor, a deep truth and reconciliation process that gives us all an honest look at ourselves, or even a refusal to let Bush’s version of his tenure become the official historical record. These men did not represent the best of who we are, and more than that, they dragged us lower. This shame is theirs to own, fully and, if possible, legally.

I’m weary and depressed tonight. The physical part of it comes from looking down the long barrel of another all nighter following a full day’s worth of dev. But my main sadness is mental, and spiritual.

The Levin/McCain report just out this last week officially determined that Bush and his administration willfully set out to implement a policy of torture, replete with interrogation tactics (hypothermia, stress positions, humiliation, simulated drowning) borrowed from regimes like the Viet Cong. It’s also been clear for some time that Bush’s office tasked John Yoo and David Addington with creating a legal framework to give them cover on war crimes prosecution. Hell, Cheney brazenly admitted it to ABC News – saying directly and unequivocally “yes, I approved waterboarding and other tactics”.

Astoundingly, the media still refuses to call these methods torture, instead preferring to parrot the phrases “harsh” or “enhanced interrogation techniques”, phrases coined by the Nazis to rhetorically obfuscate their crimes. The media also seems perfectly fine to hound Obama on non-existent ties to the buffoon of an Illinois governor, while giving Karl Rove space to say, with a straight face, that Obama needs to be more transparent. And Rick Warren, champion of “Biblical principles”, still cannot bring himself to condemn Bush’s moral failure.

Millions are losing their homes from predatory lending. Our hard-earned tax dollars are being flushed away into the coffers of the same crooks and incompetents that got us into this mess.

These aren’t abstractions. These are families and lives shattered by war, injury, financial failure, fear. These are wounds to the soul and psyche that will take a generation to heal.

Bush is off to a mansion in Dallas, Cheney to a massive personal fortune and ranch in Wyoming, Rove to a leadership spot in the GOP and a commentator on Fox, the media baboons to their six-figure incomes, the incompetents to other circles of power and wealth, Rick Warren to his prestigious pastorship.

We have been let down by our leaders, our truth-finders, our men of God. And for what? Who is left to make an answer for all this besides the bloodied victims and an outrage-numbed and distracted public?

I’m thinking on the 73rd Psalm. Its baffled anguish resonates and feels deeply true.

I was very moved tonight by the pictures coming from the rallies all over the nation today in support of gay marriage and against the harsh, vindictive bans passed in California, Florida and Arizona. It wasn’t just big cities like New York or San Fransisco or L.A. We’re talking Missoula, Peoria, Greensville, Grand Forks – hometowns in conservative areas. (Seattle held its own huge rallies, of course.)

What was moving was the spontenaity of the protests (organized within just this past week completely virally online), the diversity of the marchers (all ages, orientations, races), and the spirit of non-violent, optimisic inclusiveness. Even more was the general reports, even in the reddest of states, of good will and support coming from passing drivers and pedestrians. The public, still buzzing with the civic spirited victory of electing Obama last week, has turned its attention to another long-festering injustice in America – gay rights – with a mind to end it.

As Christians, Janece and I’s own awakening to gay rights came as it has for many others – through our friends and family. We could not, in good conscience, avoid reassessing the religion we’d been brought up in against the reality of the lives of those we loved. We couldn’t take refuge in the now obviously false assertions about homosexuality we grew up with. Tropes like “gays don’t have strong father figures” or “gays lead lives of unrestrained debauchery” or “gays are morally perverted” were revealed for the shoddy ignorance they were as we watched our friends struggle to assert their obvious normalcy to their families and church communities, sometimes despairing to the point of feeling suicidal or losing contact with those they loved all together.

This is about truth and freedom – for gays, for Christians, for society. Jesus said, “You shall know the truth, and the truth shall set you free.”

Gays come to understand that there is something true and unassailable about their sexuality. To deny that truth is to deny their own personhood, their own self-worth, and to start down a path that inflicts the bitter fallout on their own mental health and their personal relationships. There are too many stories of gays who have cut their own bodies, put themselves and others at risk with dangerous sexual behavior, destroyed their most precious relationships and even committed suicide because they could not come out and embrace the truth.

As Christians, I feel it is ungodly to shun that truth that we all can see with our own God-given understanding and rationality in favor of a lie – a lie that not only diminishes our faith but that has inflicted so much needless suffering and loss on gays and their families. There is no difference between a good gay relationship and a good straight relationship, nor is there a difference between bad relationships in either orientation. It is our duty to adjust our religious and moral understanding to the real world. Why build something as precious as our faith on elaborately convoluted and demonstrably false theological contortions when the truth is as obvious and simple as “gay is normal”?

As a society, the long-standing lies about gays have cost us. There are hundreds of thousands of gay couples who would gladly adopt some of our many needy and willing children if only they had the same protections from the state as Janece and I do. There are countless gay couples who have been uprooted or seen their productive personal and civil lives disrupted by needless and punitive laws. Our military currently suffers from having to remove gay translators and service personnel when they are desperately needed in the theater. As with minority civil rights, we have been needlessly wounding our own national body and soul and we merely need to stop the madness to see a surge in contribution and participation in our local communities.

From a purely practical standpoint, gay marriage is no threat to anyone. The civil recognition of married gay couples does not affect a religious person’s theological understanding. Churches, private religious schools and institutions will not have their exclusionary behavior affected as long as they don’t take public monies or support. Our communities will gain, and the only losers will be those in the public square insisting on discrediting themselves by peddling obvious falsehood.

I salute the marchers today, especially the first-time participants, for their raw enthusiasm for change and their unwillingness to tolerate anyone’s lack of civil freedoms. I salute my gay friends and family for their courage and love and hope for all of us.

No more lies, no more division, no more suffering. The time for truth and freedom is now.

Don’t forget to read part one for a refresher on my levels of junk food before diving in.

THE NEWS MEDIA

Everyone likes to bag on the media. It’s so easy to take potshots at the media that it almost feels embarrassing to include it. But you know, this election cycle it’s really come home to me how badly our “serious” news media corrodes our national health.

I told Janece last night that our national conversation about who we are and want to be as Americans largely takes place in the media (although the Net is changing that a bit with person-to-person interaction). The problem, I argued, is that the media has the attention span and maturity level of a 3 year old, easily distracted by embarrassing situations and loud noises. So, here we are in national crisis mode trying to have an important conversation using a 3 year old as our go-between like a bad game of “Telephone”. It’s a problem because the 3-year-old only wants to tell you the stuff that they find interesting, namely, well… embarrassing situations and loud noises.

On top of that, the media’s relationship with profit is also problematic, to say the least. We just got done with season 5, the final season, of The Wire — one of the most heartwrenching, grownup shows to hit the silver screen. This season covered the complex relationship that the press has with the institutions it’s trying to penetrate and hold accountable, and how the profit motive has driven serious journalists and serious stories further and further into the fringes. The role of owners in the dumbing down of the news in the battle to continue to make profit isn’t a left-wing fever dream – it’s a simple equation that I think every American can easily understand, and a topic that’s been covered by much smarter people than myself.

So, junk food.

The Level 1 junk here is pretty easy – pretty much any “reporting” on Fox News, baldly partisan outlets willing to spread the most outlandish material. It’s the kind of ridiculous, entertaining farce that ends up with a Fox reporter shouting “do you not believe in freedom?!” to a group of irritated demonstrators at the Dem convention in Denver:

Level 2 would probably include much of the commentariat and punditry and weekly columnists — people we seem to feel should have something to say since they’re on the national stage when in fact their primary purpose seems to be to pull a paycheck for filling column space or airtime. Like a group of squabbling monkeys throwing feces, they mindless repeat each other’s tired cliches and cannibalized memes (“Obama threw him under the bus”, etc.) and they endlessly pick over the latest artificial controversies (anything with “-gate” in it like “Bittergate” or the current “lipstick on a pig” tizzy) without any seeming irony.

The insatiable need to fill the 24 hour news pipeline has news shows trucking in these yahoos by the dozens to kick up so much dust that we forget what we were supposed to be talking about, and why it was important. It’s poisonous, and it’s dangerous.

Poison – These hired guns reduce our essential civic philosophical differences and need for solutions to mere shouting, pettiness, inconsequentiality, posturing and bad behavior. They aren’t there to argue for our betterment. They’re there to win an argument and look good enough to be invited back. The net effect is the loss of our communal confidence in the ability of our conversation to make a difference and take us somewhere.

Dangerous – This system is wide open for easy abuse. These “experts” are presented to the public with no qualification besides the fact that they must know what they’re talking about because they’re on TV and the viewer is not. They are not asked about their personal agendas — they only have to offer their opinion on the topic du jour. This led to the scandal that was revealed a few months ago that the Pentagon used a selected cadre of retired military brass to push its talking points about the invasion of Iraq. These military “experts” were all briefed on the Pentagon’s objectives and made the rounds to show after show to help the Bush administration sell a senseless and costly war, and not one – not ONE – was ever held to account on these shows for their points of view or had their loyalties investigated prior to their appearances.

The bankrupt nature of the commentariat was laid bare in a beautiful “Emperor Has No Clothes” moment by Jon Stewart when he appeared on Crossfire and in all seriousness begged the talking monkeys to please give Americans something real. The way they squirm when suddenly confronted on live TV with a serious American citizen asking serious questions is something to see:

Level 3 are the professional journalists and news anchors. I listen to the Diane Rehm podcast pretty religiously. It’s instructive and the non-shouting format allows for more in-depth analysis of both the news and the news analyzers — the way they select and frame the issues they report. These people are as serious as anyone about the job they do, and I’ve learned a lot by listening to them, especially the international reporters. But, a subtle weakness and lack of substance persists.

First, I’ve noticed a lack of self-critique and introspection. It’s been instructive to hear how these professional reporters who pride themselves on “journalistic integrity” and “objective reporting” talk about their role in reporting the Iraq war.

In our rush to war there was no concerted effort by any major journalist or outlet to resist the relentless propaganda and persist in giving the American public a clear-eyed look at what the adventure could cost and what grounds the war was to be waged upon. From today’s perspective, I think the general agreement is that the drums of war were beating so loud that to speak out would have been journalistic suicide. There is no cost today to acknowledge how badly the press let down the American public — a simple “We screwed up badly and let down the American public” would go a long way. So, it’s instructive that in all the post-mortems on the press and Iraq that I’ve heard, there’s been almost NO serious apologies.

This reluctance to take the self-reflective aspect of their job seriously, to admit that their vaunted journalistic independence and integrity has been compromised has hobbled the more serious press over time as the public becomes more cynical about the press’ lack of courage. How else can we as humans become more honest without acknowledging our dishonesty? How can the press be trusted if there is no self-examination when they get it so wrong? Who can we trust to actually ask the hard questions?

Second, there is too much tolerance for sloppiness and lazy reporting. It concerns me that major reporters and publications/outlets can get so many basic facts wrong — facts that any blogger can track down with a few hours persistence on Google. Even on a serious venue like Diane Rehm’s show, I’m aghast at how often her guests, who supposedly cover their topics full time and probably consume much more media than me can get basic facts, figures, dates, and circumstances that I know from casual browsing so wrong. The blogs I read break stories generally pretty quickly and accurately, and yet they are constantly being derided on the show as “fringe”. No wonder market share is declining so bad for print newspapers and why the pressure from the always-on Net has made cable news into such a farce. Sloppy reporting, a lack of a basic grasp of the factual context of an issue, makes for junk food reporting.

And third, there is too much deference to public figures and colleagues. Our national image of the reporter is the bulldog — pugnacious and tenacious, someone that won’t stop until the story hits the street. But in reality, reporters can get corrupted by the same star power, the same insular protection of colleagues, the same access to the wealthy and powerful that anyone can. I’ve listened to reporters on the Diane Rehm show give her and each other too much leeway, too much deference, and not near enough pushback on each other’s assumptions and preconceptions. Over time, this diplomatic treatment can dull the instinct to track a story as far as it needs to go and robs the public of the full picture – the perpetrators, the victims.

Tomorrow, I’ll tackle politics – hopefully in a shorter article and more coherently. (I was literally falling asleep while finishing this, so my pardon if it petered out.)

I read political blogs incessantly, as you can tell from my posts. Tonight’s swing through my blog roundup left me feeling the same way I feel after eating too many M&Ms or drinking too much diet soda (which I did today, sadly – I should really stay away from the stuff). I felt jarred loose, dissatisfied, a bit nauseous, restless and not focused enough to concentrate on or enjoy my work tasks. Reading what I wrote last night and meditating on the wonderful photos that Janece took of Amira’s experience helped stabilize me a bit with some real human connection — like a diabetic bringing down the blood sugar.

We all know what junk food is. It’s stuff you eat that doesn’t give you the healthy raw material your body needs. In fact, it can be edibles that actively work against your digestion and bodily health — material that saps your body’s energy and hampers the smooth operation of its interwoven, complex processes.

The trouble with junk food is that it isn’t always easy to identify.

There’s your Pixie Stix and your chocolate candy and your Cheetos: straight up, easy-to-spot junk that’s not pretending to be something else. We’ll call it Level 1 junk food. Eating that stuff feels honest – you know it’s crap, you know that it will make you feel like crap, and you eat it precisely because it tastes good going down. No surprise, no dashed expectations.

It gets a bit more murky when you get to things like Big Macs, microwave chimichangas, french fries, and “fortified” breakfast cereal with candy colored animals on the front: Level 2 junk food. I mean, yeah, everyone knows that it’s bad for you, right? But then why do we feel like it’s OK to make a whole meal out of those things as though it were real food, when in fact trying to actually subsist on the stuff could kill you? Eating that kind of junk food feels more dishonest — everyone knows it’s crap but we all behave like it’s actual food because it’s quick, it fills us up and feels good going down.

And then there’s the real undercover stuff, Level 3 junk food – fruit smoothies, the food pyramid, meals with 6 different kinds of starches masquerading as “vegetables”, meat from animals raised on corn that’s not technically even fit for their digestion, flawless-looking vegetables grown at hyper-speed using pesticides and other non-nutritive methods, Spam. If you take the long view, that kind of food doesn’t really benefit you, even though it does sustain in a sort of day to day sense and has somewhat more nutritive content than the other two types. For many people, they don’t even know that they’re eating a kind of long-term filler food that has more drawbacks than benefits years down the line.

All junk food is detrimental to having a full robust body, but to me Level 2 and Level 3 junk food are in some ways worse for you because they are less obvious and more easy to miss, often more systemically pervasive, and require more intentional scrutiny and change of habit than people are often willing or able to give.

In a physical sense, we humans need as close to undiluted, nutritive material as we can get for the optimal sustenance of our bodies. In a communal and spiritual sense, we humans need as close to undiluted, substantive relational encounters as we can get for the optimal sense of connection and aliveness. And that’s where the cultural junk food comes in.

News media, politics, church. Among other things, we depend on these transactional social institutions to provide us with a communal context and framework that can help us determine how to democratically co-govern our nation. But there’s hidden junk food spreading throughout these common institutions masquerading as something necessary for our national conversation while instead corroding our national health. Like my experience tonight, I can feel the negative effects of it, and I think I’m not the only one. Many of us are taking in more and more of what is less and less able to communally feed us.

I’ll post more on this tomorrow, but I’d love to hear your thoughts about the ways you’ve felt any cultural malnourishment in these three areas, especially from your point of view as an American.

This damned election. I can’t count how many hours I’ve spent pouring over the twists and turns. It’s agony. I desperately want America to redeem itself by picking a President that can articulate our appeal to the world, to represent the grown-up side of our nation instead of the bullying, chest-thumping frat boy side for a change. It’s exciting, all the twists and turns, almost literally like made-for-TV political thriller. But it’s also real life, with real agonizing consequences, and it all turns unpredictably day by day on that vast, unmanageable collective colossus we call “the American public”.

In short, can we PLEASE just elect the most intelligent, agile, articulate, exciting candidate in a generation and get on with our national business? It feels insulting to have to deal with even considering Mr. Let’s Blow Up Russia and Ms. Unknown Quantity A Heartbeat Away From Negotiating With Putin.  C’mon, America.  Come through.

Speaking of Palin, I’m really irritated at the Christian social conservatives who are now rah-rah-ing her selection in spite of it being obvious that McCain is using them yet again just like Rove did even though he thinks they’re nuts, and Palin being completely unproven to be able to lead America with little to no time to test her heft and qualifications. They seem to be unable to see any other colors besides black and white. They’ve been trained at the whip by countless sermons and a pervasive culture of jingoism and conformity within their churches to simply twitch their voting fingers in response to hot-button issues:  “No Abortion!” BZZZT. “Gays Bad!” BZZZT. “Guns Good!” BZZZT.

I can say this because of being in and around the church my whole life. Individually, the Christians I’ve met are almost universally warm, uncynical and accommodating, and have surprisingly nuanced views on hot issues. But as congregations, as a voting block, it’s way too easy to get them to adopt a mob mentality, to rile them against or rouse them for the latest silly bandwagon — The Last Temptation Of Christ, the DaVinci Code, Disney’s gay policy, Obama is a Muslim commie, Palin is “a great mom and moose hunter” and is therefore automatically ready to lead America in a time of peril, etc. etc. After all, which group was it that most enthusiastically chose, got out the vote for, and adamantly defended Bush — one of the worst presidents we’ve ever had?

Considering the resoundingly anti-establishment prophetic tradition in the Old Testament, or the radical elevation of the least of these by Christ, or the relentless persecution of the early church by the religious and civil leadership because of being perceived as dangerous revolutionaries, the uniform, knee-jerk responses of church folk en masse is kinda hard to square with their spiritual legacy.

Who taught these fine people to be sheep, to be corporately color-blind to nuance and context, to lose their brains and personal convictions when they’re grouped with other Christians? Who taught their teachers to value control and uniformity over teaching their congregants to talk back and challenge their own leaders assumptions? Who led these churches to buy wholesale into tying a stultifying, divisive political ideology and a sick consumerist culture to the unpredictable, boundary-breaking Christ?

For the sake of the Gospel, and the sake of redeeming some credibility, Evangelicals in America need to unhook their brains from the hot-button buzzer and let their natural, thoughtful and nuanced views on life be expressed. Otherwise, like now, they’ll just continue to come off as stupid and irrelevant.

We have an independent rag here in Seattle called The Stranger. It’s the type of indie paper that promotes hip local bands, runs hetero and GLBT personals for people wanting to get laid and escort services in the back couple of pages, pushes for drug legalization, and gets on the nerves of all the major papers and local politicians. I’m sure there’s something similar in your town. It’s been around a long time, and is edited by Dan Savage, a sex advice columnist with some notoriety.

And their perspective on churches and Christianity? Do you have to even ask? Let’s put it this way: One of Dan Savage’s long running (and extremely depressing) series on the Stranger’s blog is called “Youth Pastor Watch” where he posts stories about pastors getting booked on criminal charges, usually sexually related. (Sadly, he has new material to post at least 5-6 times a week, I kid you not. It’s depressing.) The Stranger also has a long-running feud with Antioch Bible Church and Mars Hill Church, among others, and gleefully bashes them on a regular basis.

Unsurprisingly, I guess, I like the Stranger and follow the blog daily. I find them worth reading: funny, honest, intellectually stimulating and kinda cute in their efforts to out-brash and out-cool everyone else, and their comment section is a humorous playground of bad behavior and snarky oneupsmanship.

One of their regular blog writers, a guy named Charles Mudede, is extremely bright and posts intellectually intense material on art, architecture, world affairs, music, philosophy and other stuff. (He wrote the post about the new Grace Jones video I pointed to a few posts ago.) I’m pretty sure he thinks Christianity is a load of shit. So imagine my surprise when I read this post he wrote Thursday. It’s pretty astounding, and worth re-posting here in full. Read carefully:

Then the governor’s soldiers took Jesus into the palace and gathered the whole troop around him. They took off his clothes and put a bright red cape on him. They twisted some thorns into a crown, placed it on his head, and put a stick in his right hand. They knelt in front of him and made fun of him by saying, “Long live the king of the Jews!” After they had spit on him, they took the stick and kept hitting him on the head with it. After the soldiers finished making fun of Jesus, they took off the cape and put his own clothes back on him. Then they led him away to crucify him.

It is only here I can see the glory (truth) of Jesus, the moment he is mocked, the moment he is the subject of derision and fun. The soldiers are right to laugh at him. They are not crazy; Jesus is crazy. Like the narrator of Gogol’s short story “Diary of a Madman,” he is the king of nothing. He rode into town on a fucking donkey, and his parents are of the lowest birth. The Messiah was supposed to be a great warrior, not a carpenter. This is a complete joke. Mock him we must.

And for those who believe he is the One, the “King of Kings,” every time you read this passage, do not wish the worst (hell fire, eternal damnation) for (or cast curses on) his mockers. They have every right and reason to humiliate this mouse of a man. Instead see that this is really your king; this is who he really is and nothing more. The contempt and laughter he rightly deserves is also the source of his greatness. You want to renounce real kings–with their palaces, rings, wives, and hounds–and raise and praise this penniless fool who claims to be the creator of the world. (emphasis mine)

I have to admit that reading that kinda rubbed me the wrong way at first, got my hackles up. That, and the comments in response. Can you believe his audacity, his nerve, to call Jesus a mouse, crazy, a penniless fool? Then, after thinking about it, I realized he wasn’t the first one to have said it:

For the message of the cross is foolishness to those who are perishing, but to us who are being saved it is the power of God. For it is written: “I will destroy the wisdom of the wise; the intelligence of the intelligent I will frustrate.”

Where is the wise man? Where is the scholar? Where is the philosopher of this age? Has not God made foolish the wisdom of the world? For since in the wisdom of God the world through its wisdom did not know him, God was pleased through the foolishness of what was preached to save those who believe. Jews demand miraculous signs and Greeks look for wisdom, but we preach Christ crucified: a stumbling block to Jews and foolishness to Gentiles, but to those whom God has called, both Jews and Greeks, Christ the power of God and the wisdom of God. For the foolishness of God is wiser than man’s wisdom, and the weakness of God is stronger than man’s strength.

Brothers, think of what you were when you were called. Not many of you were wise by human standards; not many were influential; not many were of noble birth. But God chose the foolish things of the world to shame the wise; God chose the weak things of the world to shame the strong. He chose the lowly things of this world and the despised things—and the things that are not—to nullify the things that are, so that no one may boast before him. It is because of him that you are in Christ Jesus, who has become for us wisdom from God—that is, our righteousness, holiness and redemption.

~ St. Paul, in his first letter to the Corinthians, chapter 1

It boggles my mind that in a few paragraphs Charles Mudede, staff writer for the snarky, irreverent, church-bashing Stranger in Seattle, can get to the heart of St. Paul’s analysis better than many pastors I’ve heard. He gets what many Christians and professional church strategists don’t (or won’t) get: If you’re going to follow Jesus, then be prepared to be the “mouse”, crazy, foolish.

Be prepared to speak the simple humble truth to people that you’d normally rather try to impress. Be prepared to be marginalized by the powerful, the affluent, the ones in charge. Be prepared to be counted among the worst and weakest, the repeat failures, to be passed over or be shunned because you don’t hang with the “it” crowd. Be prepared to actively seek to be last in line and serve those to whom you’d normally be tempted to feel superior. Be prepared to be silent and patient in the face of ridicule, to live in faith and trust and forgiveness even if people think you’re an idiot for letting go of your own self-interest and sincerely believing in some archaic nonsense like “God”.

And collectively be prepared to demand that our churches and church culture do the same; that not a single activity take place in the church board rooms, budgets, classrooms, sanctuaries, magazines, music, political activism, colleges, etc. that doesn’t emulate the crazy, weak, foolishness of Jesus.

It seems to me that either we Christians as individuals and a subculture embrace this reality with our whole life and effort — renounce the modern kings and powers of our culture and, as Charles suggests, “raise and praise this penniless fool who claims to be the creator of the world” — or resign ourselves to our current reputation as just another hysterical, hypocritical, self-absorbed, special-interest social group.

Thanks for the cold, invigorating bucket of reality, “Pastor” Charles.

After God had finished addressing Job, he turned to Eliphaz the Temanite and said, “I’ve had it with you and your two friends. I’m fed up! You haven’t been honest either with me or about me—not the way my friend Job has. So here’s what you must do. Take seven bulls and seven rams, and go to my friend Job. Sacrifice a burnt offering on your own behalf. My friend Job will pray for you, and I will accept his prayer. He will ask me not to treat you as you deserve for talking nonsense about me, and for not being honest with me, as he has.”

~ The Bible, Book of Job, Chapter 42, Verses 7-9

Janece browsed through the book of Job in the Bible last night. She had some great insights that we’ve been thinking on today. Hopefully I won’t be stepping on her toes by meditating on it here.

The first lesson: Calamities happen. They are senseless and they can come in waves, and they can come on those who least deserve them. Some friends of ours are experiencing this right now, and I could pick thousands of nasty people who I’d rather give their circumstances and trials to. But that’s the way it is. If one of your reasons for being spiritual is to cozy up to a Higher Power so as to guarantee you and your family’s safety, I hate to break it to you but you’re outta luck. We are vulnerable simply by virtue of being human, and no ritual, icon or amulet is going to make things otherwise.

The second lesson: For those tempted to be self-righteous about their own lack of troubles and tempted to blame the trouble of others on not being in cahoots with the Almighty, some friendly advice: Don’t go there. What was it that made God so pissed off at Job’s friends? After all, they were just trying to help him get morally straightened out. They were sure that he’d done something to get on God’s bad side, and like any good spiritual friend would they preached at him to make things right. It turns out that in all their self-righteous sermonizing, they forgot to do the one thing that might have made a difference: Shut up and share his grief.

“Bear one another’s burdens”. We like to think that a short prayer and a nice little nugget of our homegrown spiritual wisdom is somehow meaningful to someone going through hell, that it’s as close as we need to get to them to fulfill our spiritual support duties. To walk with someone when you’re hurting with them, when you don’t have a single answer or reason for the calamity they’re facing, when all you can do is bow your own head in grief and huddle silently with them in their pain – day after day: that’s a harder responsibility to take on.

As seems to be the case so often in the Bible, it was the ones who thought they had it the most together spiritually that turned out to be causing the most problem. Job’s friends were so busy defending their own spiritual assumptions by moralizing and sermonizing at Job that, even though they presumably wanted to, they couldn’t bring themselves to ask the same honest, simple question he asked: “Why is this messed up situation happening, and, God, why aren’t you making it right?” The fact that their preachy, self-righteous attitudes had made things harder for Job pissed off God enough that Job — the loser, the man who was beaten down, the man who his friends said got it wrong — was the only one who could step in and make things right between his friends and God.

In conclusion, for all those prosperity doctrine Christians who have the audacity to look down on those who are struggling for being “out of God’s favor”, take a hard look into the mirror of Job’s friends. You may want to start getting your head straight and asking for forgiveness, because the people you’re looking down on right now are the ones you’re gonna need to put in a good word with God for your sorry asses.

Come gather ’round people wherever you roam
And admit that the waters around you have grown
And accept it that soon you’ll be drenched to the bone.
If your time to you is worth savin’
Then you better start swimmin’ or you’ll sink like a stone
For the times they are a-changin’.
~ Bob Dylan

I’ve never been a Bob Dylan fanatic, but these lyrics just grabbed my short hairs and yanked me around tonight.

Tonight was a Big Conversation – a fork in the road that’s going to set off our next leg of this journey and a coalescing of some life lessons that have been building for a while. Both Janece and I feel it.

It started today when I took Amira to the park. It’s a great little park called Salisbury Point Park, right on the Hood Canal near the bridge on the Kitsap side with a drop-dead gorgeous view. It has a little playground and some picnic areas attached to canal beachfront and a nice little dual boat launch. We had a good time for the first half – playing on the swings, walking down to the dock to watch people crabbing, walking the pebble beach and scooping sand. Then, without warning, my mood dropped like a rock over something stupid — Amira stomping on our sand mountain and throwing some sand and not obeying the first time when I asked her to stop. Stupid shit. I got pretty irritated, but did good at not taking it out on her. We moved on to start playing again, but I was pretty dark so I just sat on the sidelines and watched her play.

What floated immediately to the top of my mind was “I’m unhappy, and I’m not doing anything about it. I’m not doing anything meaningful with my life and I’m adrift. I need a goal, I need purpose. I can’t even be with Amira and enjoy this spot because this thing isn’t being handled, and I’m being irresponsible with my life and with my family by not handling it.”

Janece and Amira graciously surfed my mood for the rest of the evening, and after watching a couple of episodes of The Wire, season 4, I had enough mental clear space to start digging around in conversation with Janece. And here’s the result – as obvious as it may be to some of y’alls:

I’m going to do spiritual worship ministry, probably somewhere in Seattle, and I think that means that I’m going back to work for someone else as a day job.

After this post and the comments I got back, the conversation finally sunk in about ministry. Really, there’s nothing that is more meaningful to me work-wise than seeing people feel the full weight and measure of their lives, and seeing them lift those lives to God to be renewed or re-built. That’s what I want to do. But I want to do the parts that I’m built for — music, worship, art, community-building — and not mess with the parts that I’m not built to do. I’ve got some really definite ideas about how to do it, but I’m open to taking the journey and seeing where it leads.

I’ve fought this for a while now. The reasons I haven’t committed are largely these: Not wanting to leave behind the skill set I’ve built in design and technical strategy, not wanting to jeopardize my family’s future by not doing the logical work of building a business or residual income that could help secure the time of Janece and I’s inevitable old-ness, not wanting to work for someone else, not wanting to miss being around Janece and Amira any time of the day.

My reasoning was that I could, if I wanted, build something on my own that would accomodate those things. But tonight, I realized that I don’t want to. I’m all out of initiative and enthusiasm for the inevitable toil it will take to get over the hump into a business that is on it’s way to being self-maintaining. I just don’t have it in me to lose another decade sidelining the life I need to live solely for the purpose of financial security.

So, the most obvious and logical thing is to go back to work for someone else. My skill set is large and multi-faceted, and I’d be a good fit for all kinds of workplaces. I have a friend at Disney who’s loved working there and could be helpful in helping me locate something. Janece still has HR contacts at Microsoft. My friend Sky has some connections to the non-profit world. All I know is that I want to put in 40 hrs, get some health benefits so we can take care of our teeth and not be freaked out if we have to take Amira to the ER with a broken bone, and then have time — glorious time, night time, weekend time — that is free of all of the business concerns now clogging my mental arteries.

I may be slow to get the point, but once I get it, it’s got. The search starts after my work this weekend. This post will sink down the list over the next days, but I’m clear that our new intentions will not. I’m excited. I’m grateful for our time here in this place away from things, for the chance to let what has been hidden bubble up.

If you’re the praying type, pray for us that our instincts would be sure-footed, that the timing and opportunities coincide in serendipitous ways, and that wherever we land that we can be of maximum benefit to the world and the Kingdom.

There will be more on this for sure, but for now here’s the full lyrics to Dylan’s great song:

Come gather ’round people wherever you roam
And admit that the waters around you have grown
And accept it that soon you’ll be drenched to the bone.
If your time to you is worth savin’
Then you better start swimmin’ or you’ll sink like a stone
For the times they are a-changin’.

Come writers and critics who prophesize with your pen
And keep your eyes wide, the chance won’t come again
And don’t speak too soon for the wheel’s still in spin
And there’s no tellin’ who that it’s namin’.
For the loser now will be later to win
For the times they are a-changin’.

Come senators, congressmen please heed the call
Don’t stand in the doorway, don’t block up the hall
For he that gets hurt will be he who has stalled
There’s a battle outside and it is ragin’.
It’ll soon shake your windows and rattle your walls
For the times they are a-changin’.

Come mothers and fathers throughout the land
And don’t criticize what you can’t understand
Your sons and your daughters are beyond your command
Your old road is rapidly agin’.
Please get out of the new one if you can’t lend your hand
For the times they are a-changin’.

The line it is drawn, the curse it is cast
The slow one now will later be fast
As the present now will later be past
The order is rapidly fadin’.
And the first one now will later be last
For the times they are a-changin’.

~”The Times, They Are A-Changin’”, Bob Dylan

Real art reveals. Grace Jones’ new video for her single, Corporate Cannibal, is real art and what it reveals is gut-level disturbing — a visual stare into the soulless, self-feeding, unfeeling, self-justifying animus behind corporate greed and power. Her incredibly expressive face is smeared, melted, stretched and twisted into a sinister amorphous writhing blob, like a barrel of oil or a suffocating hole come to life. And that’s all it is — you are forced to stare at this thing staring back at you without any trace of humanity, humor or remorse and listen to it say things like:

pleased to meet you, pleased to have you on my plate
your meat is sweet to me
your destiny, your fate

you’re my life support, your life is my sport

i’ll consume my consumers, with no sense of humour
i’ll give you a uniform, chloroform
sanitize, homogenize, vaporize… you

C.S. Lewis, the Oxford scholar who was one of the better recent creative framers of the Christian worldview, said he saw hell not as the dramatic, fiery pit and demons not as leathery winged nightmares, but like a cold, featureless, fluorescent lit office building where pale, suffocated figures in tidy suits moved quickly and efficiently through the corridors with the sole aim to promote themselves and crush, demean, harass, oppress, torture and feed off the suffering they are able to inflict on anyone else around them. No friends, no companions, no passionate enemies – only mutual loathing and uncaring manipulation for all eternity.

I think this video comes close to visualizing the raw hunger behind this horrible scene – the need to feed oneself, no matter the expense to others. Charles Mudede at the Stranger’s blog — The Slog — says it well:

What’s most impressive about Grace Jones’ new video is its offers the viewer no passage to or flashes of enjoyment or thrills. The whole work is unpleasant to watch and hear—a grinding beat, a morphing monster. This is not a spectacle of corporate capital, corporate greed, corporate hunger. A spectacle seduces the thing it exploits and annihilates. With Jones as the corporate beast, there is no seduction, no sugar, no soft suffocation. Grace Jones makes every effort to fully represent the terrifying force of today’s global rich.

I’ve rarely heard a sermon tackling this form of evil and the complacent parts we sometimes play in how it spreads, how unthinking we are about this kind of evil and how we are bombarded with enticements and pressures to see it as normal, as the “American way of life”. In fact, even many churches and preachers blatantly promote this self-absorbed philosophy of wealth, status and consumption. And yet, this dark animus is THE main cause of our global crisis of human misery and ecological decay.

It’s an addiction, a willing acquiescence to a destructive lie. We give everything to live this kind of life, and it gives us nothing back. Like addicts, together we have to reach down through our numbed senses to feel that we’ve hit bottom, and begin the hard work of disentangling from the thing we desire that is eating us alive.

(Hat tip to Charles Mudede and the Slog for posting the video.)

I’m facing down an all-nighter tonight, and so I thought I’d avoid it a little longer by doing my post early. Huzzah for procrastination – my most trusted companion when the schedule gets tight!

A friend of mine semi-jokingly calls me “Pastor Paul”. She and her husband haven’t been to church in a long while, mostly for the same reasons you hear a lot of people express and that I’ve expressed from time to time in my blog. Nonetheless, they’ll call sometimes to be prayed with when they’re overwhelmed by their troubles and don’t feel like they have conviction or energy to pray alone. It’s an honor to be asked to do that, and I kinda like the fake title. But the association always makes me a little queasy, having grown up in the Evangelical church environment and having seen the things that pastors have to deal with.

For one thing, pastors have the crappiest job around sometimes. They generally tend to be the punching bags for everyone in their congregation — the board, the congregation, the leadership above them. Whatever anyone rightly or wrongly perceives as going wrong, they are generally happy to pin it on the pastor, many times in that nasty pseudo-nice “wrap the backstab in a bible verse” kinda way. Pastors are expected to be outstanding orators, administrators, scholars, caregivers, leaders and sometimes even the tech support person — all wrapped up into one under-paid, time-limited person. And, of course, they and their families should always come off looking and acting like Jesus, Mary and Joseph gathered the manger in soft focus on a Christmas card. It’s a thankless set of expectations that has a tendency to escalate out of control, even if the pastor is trying their best to live normally and tamp down expectations.

Pastors also have the unenviable job description of being the de-facto go-between for people and God — a task not for the faint of heart. What sane person would want a job where a weeping mother looks you in the eye and asks that God, through you, give her some justification for the desolation and grief caused by her child’s untimely, perhaps horrible, death? Who willingly take on the Sisyphean task of trying to discern what the God who causes and sustains this*:

is trying to communicate by reading primary source material written in cultures almost too ancient to know about, much less understand? (I read some from the book of Judges today, and all I can say is that it left me with a big WTF?! What a crazy book.) And who would with any honesty put themselves in a position to expound truths about life with God with any kind of authority, knowing full well how full of contradictions and addictions and bad behavior and inconsistencies their own lives are?

The ancient Hebrews used to tie ropes around the priest before they’d enter the inner sanctuary where God’s presence was so that, in case God’s glory was so overwhelming that the priest died, the people outside could pull out the body without risk of dying themselves. They understood that the go-between’s job, whether dealing with humans or the Divine, is about as safe and comfortable as a lightning rod in a thunderstorm.

And yet, the times that I’ve been privileged enough to play worship leader or serve in any other kind of public ministry position have been some of the most meaningful times in my life. Janece and I sat down the other night to talk about where we want to do with the rest of our lives, and the thing that came right up for me was ministry. It’s the only job I’ve had that, difficult and discouraging or not, has always left me with the sense that spending that irretrievably gone portion of my life was totally worth it. I don’t know where exploring it would lead me, but it’s a conversation I keep coming back to and one I’m not sure I can avoid.

* (Check out more jaw-dropping photos of inter-stellar objects at NASA’s web site.)

“And now these three remain: faith, hope and love. But the greatest of these is love.”
~ St Paul in his first letter to the Corinthians (13:13).

Maria, bless you. I had no idea what I was going to write about and I was feeling totally unfocused until I read your comment. (And by the way, welcome back alla y’all commenters! I’m super-pleased that you guys jumped back in here with me and I love the feedback.)

So, here’s Maria’s question and my musings:

How does Faith differ from Hope? Can one have Hope without Faith? or the converse?

Faith. I riffed on this a little bit in my post below. Basically, I see faith as the will to act on trust – trust based in the belief that God is good and that God acts and has acted on our behalf in the past. You know that cheesy trust exercise that managers make their employees do at those awkward, forced and demoralizing “team morale events”? That’s actually a pretty decent example of faith. It’s an act of will that makes you fall backwards into the arms of Bob and Edna from Accounting, hoping like hell that they don’t hold your suggestion to Management that the money for the new computers come out of their department’s budget against you. In the same way, it’s an act of spiritual will to fall into God’s arms, to frame every moment as if: a) our lives are always one hair-breadth away from spinning out of control; b) the fall out of control is actually a fall into God’s arms who we can trust much more than Bob; c) even if we don’t feel like we’re being caught by God in a way that we can recognize, we actually are; and d) we’d do it again in the very next moment given the chance. I think that’s faith – the spark of courage and trust that catalyzes us to move toward God.

Hope. I think hope is the most naked, raw example of God’s creative image imprinted on us. The filthiest, most disease-ridden, desperate human being in the cruelest of the world’s circumstances can, in an instant, conjure up out of blank nothing the possibility of something beyond, something better — a warm bed or full meal, kindess, a cure, a better society, a future. Hope is human beings looking into the future and seeing a hint of God, a glimpse of love and possibility. Hope is an as-yet-unseen horizon, a new landscape painted by faith.

Love. If Faith is taking guitar lessons, and Hope is writing a song no one’s heard before, then Love is Marvin Gaye, soul, the thing that makes it all come alive and gives it meaning and purpose. Love is the surrender to the pulse of God, the abandonment of selfishness and self-consciousness for communion and joy. Like St. Paul said, without Love all of our spiritual struggle and effort is like noise – the senseless clash of gongs and cymbals. But with Love, the intentions of Hope and the practice of Faith come together in a coherent yet mysterious whole, come alive and carry you and the audience away.

Faith, hope and love seem to be inseparable facets on the same jewel. In “Starry Night”, you can’t really separate out Van Gogh’s practiced brushstrokes from the glorious vision of the painting from the passion that suffuses it’s pulsing energy. I think in the same way St. Paul gives us an inspired insight into faith, hope and love as the hand, eye and heart of the spiritual body – all crucial to the spiritual activity of walking with God and bringing beauty into the world.

Almost forgot to post. I’d just rinsed out the sting of mouthwash before climbing into bed, and suddenly remembered. So I hauled myself downstairs and here I am…

Not much tonight. Finished Season 2 of The Wire. Sad tales, sad tales. Also, I found some cool free vector artwork — Photoshop brushes & shapes, and lots of links to other places. Start here:

We drive past a Baptist Church in Poulsbo all the time. This week’s marquee said something about not losing your faith. It struck me as an odd way to put it, the assumption that faith is like “stuff”, something you can more or less of, or store put in a bucket that, if you’re not careful carrying it around, will get sloshed out and be lost. The way that Hebrews (the book of the Bible) seems to describe it, faith is an action catalyst, a mindset that is the well-spring of action, the simple willingness to say “yes” and jump.

In the wandering days of the exile after Egypt, the story reads that the Hebrews would build a monument when something amazing had happened, when they’d been rescued by yet another intervention by God. They did it to remind themselves that something had indeed happened and to acknowledge that it could happen again. But INBETWEEN the monuments… Well, there’s the hard part. We all remember the monument times with fondness, with that warm afterglow and the toasts and cheers and happy feelings. But that awful, unconcerned or uncertain, dark, dreary, boring, dry, anxious part that falls inbetween is the core, the meat of where we life most of our lifetime.

Faith is the decision to step forward from the monument into God-knows-what, the decision to put one foot in front of the other instead of lying down and giving up, the continual wrestling match with God over whether or not this step is the right one or even if we’re headed in the right direction. Faith is a sparkplug that powers each spiritual motion – enabling one decision at a time in the belief that our trust isn’t misplaced even as we glance back at the monument receding into the distance and hope that the next monument is just ahead.

Maybe with enough repetition my own faith spark will grow brighter, more confident, more practiced, and may even grow strong enough to illuminate the landscape around me.

The Barna Group, a non-profit Christian research organization just released this report: A New Generation Expresses its Skepticism and Frustration with Christianity. From the report:

When young people were asked to identify their impressions of Christianity, one of the common themes was “Christianity is changed from what it used to be” and “Christianity in today’s society no longer looks like Jesus.” These comments were the most frequent unprompted images that young people called to mind, mentioned by one-quarter of both young non-Christians (23%) and born again Christians (22%).

Kinnaman explained, “That’s where the term ‘unChristian’ came from. Young people are very candid. In our interviews, we kept encountering young people – both those inside the church and outside of it – who said that something was broken in the present-day expression of Christianity. Their perceptions about Christianity were not always accurate, but what surprised me was not only the severity of their frustration with Christians, but also how frequently young born again Christians expressed some of the very same comments as young non-Christians.”

…

David Kinnaman, who is a 12-year-veteran of the Barna team, pointed out some of the unexpected findings of the research. “Going into this three-year project, I assumed that people’s perceptions were generally soft, based on misinformation, and would gradually morph into more traditional views. But then, as we probed why young people had come to such conclusions, I was surprised how much their perceptions were rooted in specific stories and personal interactions with Christians and in churches. When they labeled Christians as judgmental this was not merely spiritual defensiveness. It was frequently the result of truly ‘unChristian’ experiences. We discovered that the descriptions that young people offered of Christianity were more thoughtful, nuanced, and experiential than expected.”

It’s sad that after all this striving, all this effort over the last decades to be “cool, hip and relevant”, that many church leaders are deeply frustrated and unable to understand why when the answer is right there in the sentence – “their perceptions were rooted in specific stories and personal interactions with Christians and in churches…It was frequently the result of truly ‘unChristian’ experiences”. I’m sure it’s tempting for them to just pass it off as the “end times” or throw up their hands and just bemoan the ungodly, callous, jaded, cynical, video-game-drugged “youth of today”. It’s hard to look into the mirror and start to grapple with the facts:

• that demographically-driven, toothless, uninformed, repetitious, self-referential pablum has become the standard of modern church worship, teaching and communal life;
• that the church leadership’s idolatrous embrace of media and political power has corrupted and compromised their mission to spread the gospel;
• that holding on to theological dinosaurs like literal creationism, end-times fantasies, and anti-homosexuality, combined with wide-spread ignorance of church and world history, are pushing the church into the fringes with the other loonies who seem unable to seriously grapple with basic scientific and historical reality;
• that the church has built it’s own airless and pale imitation of modern culture in a herculean attempt to simultaneously attract secular people while dulling all of the raw, passionate, edgy, sensual or authentic parts into a bland smoothie that won’t offend career churchgoers;
• that the church has chosen arrogant and suffocating isolation from the broken and unlovable in favor of idolizing the photogenic and the successful and the conforming.

The Church will not, and cannot, die because the Church is the body of Christ who is risen — invisible, world-wide, laboring with those who labor, mourning with those who mourn, loving the unlovable. But I don’t see any guarantees in there for churchgoers. Christ said “unless a seed falls into the ground and dies, it remains alone, but if it dies it produces much fruit.” The tectonic shift in the American church isn’t coming – it’s here – and it’s going to be a painful and prolonged death for the traditional Western church. God willing, that death will produce new fruit, new life.