Jonathan D. Fitzgerald

We Are Not That #BostonStrong

2013-04-29T11:10:41-04:00

I am a Bostonian. I was born here, have lived here my whole life excepting a few excursions, and with those interludes behind me, I intend to stay here. Boston is my home.

On Monday, April 15, Patriots' Day here in Massachusetts, when the Boston Marathon was in full swing, I was at home just outside Boston proper, way over my head in the ongoing process of learning how to be a father to a 12-day-old baby girl. While she slept for a short spell on my chest I pulled out my phone to catch up on Twitter. That was at around 3:30 p.m.

"Something happened at the marathon," I told my wife without looking up from my phone.

"Should we turn the TV on," she asked?

We did.

You know the rest. It was an awful week in Boston.

Maybe it was the sleep deprivation, or just the overwhelming unbelievableness of it all, but I just couldn't get myself to write. Even when offered the opportunity to contribute a short reflection, I found I couldn't. Too soon, I kept saying.

But others did write, and many journalists, essayists and bloggers composed beautiful and important, if often pained, responses to the tragedy. And in the short span between the bombings on Monday, the gunfight on Thursday night and the manhunt on Friday, the general theme of much of that writing was praise for the goodness of people, the strength of Bostonians and the fearlessness of first responders in the face of devastation. Boston Strong. How many writers employed the phrase "ran toward the explosions" in their praise of humanity?

That's not what I was feeling though. From the moment I first turned the television on, through when I disgustedly turned it off, while reading tweets and Facebook status updates and listening to strangers talking around the city, I couldn't get comfortable with the heroism narrative. The Boston Marathon bombings didn't speak to me of the goodness of humanity in the face of evil, but the corruption of our species and the ways we try our best to control it.

Certainly there were heroes, bright spots amid the overwhelming dark, but I can't help but think that they were the exceptions, not the rule. We talk about those who "ran toward the explosions" precisely because what they did was surprising and out of the ordinary. It was selfless.

Selflessness, though, is not the norm. Rather, it is the bombers, driven by motivations we may never fully understand, who were acting most like humans typically do -- selfish, deranged, evil.

Stephen King, in his essay, "Why We Crave Horror Movies," tell us that we like to subject ourselves to disturbing and violent imagery as a way of keeping the disturbance and violence in ourselves in check. He likens exposing ourselves to these things as "lifting a trap door in the civilized forebrain and throwing a basket of raw meat to the hungry alligators swimming around in that subterranean river beneath." This we must do because it keeps the alligators from getting out.

I don't particularly like horror movies, so I suppose I find other ways to keep the hungry alligators from getting out, but I agree with King's notion that those alligators exist below the "civilized forebrain." This is original sin, our sin nature. And this is who we are.

The celebration of humanity that followed the Marathon bombings became increasingly difficult to keep up as the week progressed, of course. As speculation fueled by greedy and sloppy reporting in the media took hold, as innocent young men were falsely accused, as Muslims in and around Boston began to fear leaving their homes, and as their fears were realized in some disgusting acts of abuse against members of their religion, the images of selfless heroes subsided.

And then, when the identities of the bombers were revealed, even while the authorities searched for them, we began to hear, as we often do, how they didn't seem the type to commit these atrocities. Particularly, Dzhokhar Tsarnaev has been described as a fairly popular student athlete at a Cambridge high school. He was enrolled at the University of Massachusetts in Dartmouth. His social media accounts have been scoured and he seems, by all accounts, normal.

This is because, and it pains me to say to it, he is normal. Most of us will never commit the kind of evil acts that he and his brother did, but we all have the capacity to do so. The Boston Marathon bombings didn't show us how good humanity is in the face of evil, they showed us how good we are at suppressing that evil, and just how fragile the barrier is between our civilized brains and the alligators beneath.

As I watched the empty speculative reporting on each of Boston's local news channels on Marathon Monday and clutched my newborn daughter to my chest, I felt obliged, with tears pooling in my eyes where they had pretty much stayed since she was born nearly two weeks prior, to apologize to her. To warn her. To tell her that the world she had just been born into is truly full of beautiful, wonderful things and that her mother and I would do our best to show her those things, but that it is also a place where, on a sunny spring day, unthinkable evil can crack through the thin facade of civilized life and remind us of the depravity we each carry inside us.

"I'm sorry," I whispered to her. "I'll do my best to protect you," I promised.

Naturally, she kept right on sleeping in my arms, blissfully unaware and safe for now.

Mumford & Sons, God and the New Sincerity

2013-02-20T16:24:30-05:00

Well the Grammy's have come and gone, leaving us with that same cacophony of yays and nays about the state of popular music that we hear each year.

Pop music is trash!

Remember when musicians actually were musicians!

-or-

We're in the midst of a pop renaissance!

Frank Ocean!

And on and on. Say what you will, but after the spectacle died down and the top honor of the night went to Mumford & Sons' album Babel, at least one thing is clear: We are in the midst of the New Sincerity.

See, in the era of the New Sincerity, it's OK to be weird and to have weird preoccupations. A few examples: Gadgets used to be just for geeks, now everyone has at least one; fantasy books consistently top best seller lists; Pinterest exists.

Ultimately, being really into something is cool now, even if that something is, well, God, as Mumford & Sons and many other Indie rockers seem to be.

A quick history of indie rock: Indie grew out of grunge rock, which was itself a reaction to the over-the-top insincerity of glam rock and heavy metal. When grunge died (most say this corresponded with the death of Kurt Cobain), what emerged was a generation of musicians -- and eventually, filmmakers, writers and artists -- who shared grunge's disgust for flashy image-laden rock, but they also eschewed the overly ironic and detached posture of their grunge forbearers. Grunge had shown that it wasn't cool to be cool, and thus Indie rockers took it even further: not being cool was kind of cool. Eventually it seemed settled that the only thing that is actually cool is being authentic.

This emphasis on authenticity means that there really is no shortage of examples of Indie artists working out questions of faith in their songs. From folkier artists like Iron and Wine, Monsters of Folk and, indeed, Mumford & Sons, to rockers like Death Cab for Cutie and Arcade Fire, examples abound. Writing for Religion Dispatches, S. Brent Plate describes Indie rock as "music of faith ... if only because the musicians give voice to pain, doubt, and survival."

Case in point: many significant indie artists, particularly early on in the movement, were either Christians or former Christians who eschewed the Christian music industry in favor of independent record labels. Some of these include Neutral Milk Hotel, Pedro the Lion, Damien Jurado, Sufjan Stevens and Further Seems Forever, among others. More than anything (and certainly not coincidentally), this is a function of the emphasis on authenticity in Indie rock, which makes it acceptable for artists to mine their religious backgrounds and continue to give voice to their spiritual journeys.

Plate points out an important aspect of Indie's dealings with faith: it's never easy. More often than not, Indie artists express doubt or disbelief through their music, and we listen along as they wrestle with God. Thus, it is not surprising that Mumford & Sons give voice to both their faith and doubt. But what is kind of surprising is how popular they've become by doing it.

Indie rock, as a cultural phenomenon, has not reached the same level of commercial appeal as other genres that have come in and out of fashion, but its influence on popular culture, from movies to television to books, is huge. Though, as Mumford's big win at the Grammy's this year, and Arcade Fire's surprise award back in 2011, shows us, Indie artists are breaking through. And, with its establishment of the New Sincerity as a permanent pop culture ethic, Indie rock's influence reaches beyond the music world.

This fact hasn't been well received by everyone. In an article for The Phoenix, a Boston alt-weekly, a writer named Luke O'Neill bemoaned this trend while simultaneously providing a rather accurate history of how it developed. He writes,

"Around the turn of the millennium, bands started to triangulate among the over-earnest butt rock of grunge, the little-boy tantrum punk of emo, and the ironic indifference of indie. Somehow, they came up with the authenticity response ... indie became less about rocking out, f---ing around, and having fun, and more about caring about s---."

So yes, Indie rock made it "cool to care," even encouraging what might have once been considered strange preoccupations with things that are not typically considered cool by the culture at large -- like God, as we've seen.

Personally, I'm not a huge fan of Mumford & Sons; this is less a function of any distaste for their music so much as a latent pop snobbery that has me wanting declare that they are "so three years ago." But, that said, I'm encouraged by their popularity and the role they play in bringing the New Sincerity to the masses. Turns out, I think over-earnest butt rock is good for us.

This post is partially excerpted from Not Your Mothers's Morals: How the New Sincerity is Changing Pop Culture for the Better.

2012: A Good Year for God at the Movies

2012-12-27T17:02:42-05:00

Well, it's December, time for the requisite warring on Christmas, shopping like it's the end of the world -- although, this year it could have been -- and making lists. Oh, the lists! There are Christmas lists and shopping lists and good lists and naughty lists and of course, my favorite kind of lists, year end "Best of" lists.

It's an unspoken rule: every publication has to make a "Best of" list. Rolling Stone offers the "50 Best Albums of 2012" alongside their "50 Best Songs" and "Best TV Moments." Paste Magazine, whose lists I prefer to Rolling Stone's, offers better versions of the same. Even NPR is getting in on the fun, dedicating an entire section of their NPR Music site to the "Best Music of 2012."

I'm obsessed with "Best of" lists, and after all the reading and new music, movie, and television show discovering, I want in on the fun. As a religion writer, though, my options seem limited. Best sermons of the year? Nah. Greatest hymns of 2012? No one cares. Best Contemporary Christian Music record? Bah, you couldn't pay me enough to write that.

But then it occurred to me, when I think back to the biggest blockbusters of the year, the movies that opened to either critical or box office acclaim (and, in some rare cases, both), I realize that this was a big year for God at the movies. In fact, as I argue in my forthcoming book Not Your Mother's Morals: How the New Sincerity is Changing Pop Culture for the Better, it's been a good time for God in pop culture in general. But let's think back on this year's biggest hits; many of them prominently featured some kind of supernatural force, to mixed results. So, in the spirit of all those year-end lists, I want to offer my own:

Top 5 appearances by God, gods, or godlike forces in the blockbuster movies of 2012.

5. The Twilight Saga: Breaking Dawn - Part 2

I hate to have to admit it, but for the last four years the Twilight films have shown us that stories about supernatural beings, albeit young and beautiful ones that pout and pose and shimmer in the sun, are every bit as popular today as they've ever been. We can't get enough of imagining what it would be like if god-like creatures walked among us, went to our high schools, saved us from natural and supernatural dangers, and had sex with us. Go ahead and laugh, but we have a long history of telling these kinds of stories. From Greek mythology to, oh I don't know, the immanent "Christ's Mass." Of course, as a Christian, I'd rather believe in Jesus, but if you're supernatural offspring of choice is Renesmee, hey, whatever floats your boat.

4. Prometheus

Billed as a kind of prequel to the Alien movies, "Prometheus" is an origin story that attempts to explain not just the hit-or-miss science fiction thrillers that have been with us since the 1980s, but it offers a unique take on the creation of our world. The details are murky, but apparently some weird, white, hairless guy was left here by his fellow god-like aliens in order to sacrifice his own DNA to get the whole evolution show on the road. That's right folks, Ridley Scott swapped the familiar "Let there be light" scenario with a marble-looking alien whose blown-apart body becomes the seeds of everything around us. Thanks for giraffes, weird alien man.

3. The Hunger Games

I know what you're thinking, there's no God in "The Hunger Games." Oh really, what do you call a person who can create a lush and beautiful world, fill it with any number of horrors (and occasional gifts) with the purpose of tormenting a group of innocent humans, and who ultimately holds their fragile lives in his hand? The Gamemakers are most certainly god-like beings. In fact, all of the citizens of the Capital appear god-like compared to the ordinary humans who occupy the other districts of Panem. Also, what kind of person sacrifices herself for the one she loves, for the innocent, and then, despite all odds, survives to return triumphant to her people? "The Hunger Games" is a story about, among other things, the relationship between people and their gods.

2. The Avengers

Super heroes have always been stand-ins for our hopes and dreams about God. And endless comic book inspired movie machine reminds us of this several times a year, from Superman and his god-like origins to the actual gods of Norse mythology that appear in "The Avengers," step-brothers Loki and Thor. There's nothing like a battle between good god and bad god. It's so entertaining, in fact, that this duo's battle spilled over from Thor's movie into the Avengers confab. Turns out, it takes four people with god-like powers (and two others who seem to be really good at being sexy and shooting arrows) to take down the bad-god Loki. But "The Avengers," like just about every super hero story, reinforces what many of us believe, that humanity is so riddled with problems, that we're in so much trouble, that we need some kind of supernatural intervention to save us from ourselves.

1. Life of Pi

This just may also be the best movie of the year -- divine intervention or otherwise. "Life of Pi" begins with a promise: a story that will make you believe in God. And then, over the course of the next 127 beautiful, eye-candy-filled minutes, it happens. Well, I'm not sure if it happens for everybody, and I already believed in God when I went in, but by offering two version of the same story (I don't think I'm giving anything away here) and then giving the audience the opportunity to choose which to believe -- the beautiful and unbelievable or the ugly and mundane -- we are provided a glimpse of what it means to have faith. "Life of Pi" reminds us of the choice we make in choosing to believe: favoring the miraculous over the mundane in an effort to understand what our lives mean.

And there you have it, the top 5 appearances by God, gods, or godlike forces in the blockbuster movies of 2012. Like I said, it was a good year for God at the movies and with the slew of super-hero inspired movies slated to be released in the next couple of years, it looks like there's no end in sight.

Perhaps there's an honorary Oscar for lifetime achievement in God's future?

The Christian Pacifist Response to the Newtown Tragedy

2012-12-18T11:31:36-05:00

The most inflammatory voices are always the loudest; this is a fact of our contemporary media landscape. Threaten to picket at the funeral of innocent children killed in cold blood and you'll make national headlines. Suggest that these killings were the result of expelling God from the public school system, and you'll get people's attention.

These actual responses to the tragic school shooting in Newtown, Conn. -- the first by the fully misguided Westboro Baptist Church gang and the second by former Arkansas governor turned inflammatory talking head Mike Huckabee -- have, by their outrageous nature, become the loudest Christian responses to the tragedy. There are others of course, voices offering comfort amidst the violence, affirming humanity's need for a savior, and reminding us of the darkness embedded in our own faith tradition, but they are lost in the clamorous din.

But there's another voice, softer even than the others, crying out in response to the murder of innocents. It is a voice that reaches back far into church history, has its roots in the life and teachings of Jesus, and finds its ultimate exemplar in his death. That is, the Christian pacifist response.

Pacifism, particularly in the Christian context, is not synonymous with inaction -- quite the opposite. Christian pacifism finds its mission in Jesus' teaching that "Greater love has no one than this: to lay down one's life for one's friends." And of course, the incredible stories emerging from the Newtown tragedy, the few rays of light amidst the overwhelming darkness, are those of the teachers who did just this -- laid down their lives for their students.

And yet, some, including many Christians, claim that if the teachers were armed, they would have been able to prevent the evil that befell them. This claim is a disservice to the sacrifice that the teachers actually made, the sacrifice explained and then exemplified by Jesus. The Christian pacifist response is not a popular one, few voices commend it, but in practice, it is the one that worked. Lives were saved because others sacrificed.

But beyond the ultimate sacrifice of the moment, what does a Christian pacifist response look like going forward? What role can it play in preventing further tragedies?

Obviously, sacrificing one's life to save another is a worst case scenario. It is the action taken when all else fails, when the world that Christians hope to create -- a peaceful Kingdom of God on earth -- fails to materialize as it so often does. But that doesn't mean that we stop working to create that world. Here we look to examples of what Jesus suggests the Kingdom will be like. The Sermon on the Mount gives us an idea of what we should be striving for: a world that offers hope to the poor, food to the hungry, joy for those who weep. It is a world in which we do not repay evil with evil, in which those who are without clothes are clothed, mercy reigns over judgment, and enemies are loved and prayed for. In the peaceable kingdom, we treat others as we would like to be treated.

These are lofty goals of course, and the most pragmatic among us -- even the most pragmatic Christians -- often look for ways around these hard commands. But the Christian pacifist acknowledges that without an effort to put the world into this order, the only option is the last one, to lay down one's life for another, as we saw in Newtown. In many ways it was a failure to bring about the peaceable kingdom that accounted for the murderous actions of a broken person. Perhaps, had he been loved and provided for, shown mercy instead of judgment, had he had been offered hope, this tragedy could have been prevented.

Count me among those crying out for stricter gun laws and more comprehensive care for the mentally unstable -- to the extent that we can model Kingdom values in our laws, I pray we do -- but I also know that this can only take us so far. The Kingdom of God can't be legislated onto earth. What will take us the rest of the way are the efforts of individuals to bring about peace on earth. If, rather than pointing fingers of blame or wishing for God's judgment, those of us who are Christians attempted to live as if the kingdom to come was here already, I believe we could prevent future tragedies.

The voice of the Christian pacifist is a quiet one, a patient one. Rather than make grand pronouncements, it sets itself to the work at hand. It speaks love, mercy and hope, and, when all else fails, it makes the ultimate sacrifice -- the kind of sacrifice that the teachers at Sandy Hook Elementary school made last Friday, the same sacrifice that Jesus made on another dark Friday, two millennia ago.

My Liberal Christian Church Is Not Dying

2012-07-22T09:01:32-04:00

At the end of my 2004 faith crisis, when I realized that I didn't want to be identified as evangelical, I felt lost. Nobody likes to be labeled, but it's scary to not know where you belong.

It was around this time that I began visiting the local Episcopal church, where friends I respected -- smart, bespectacled types with good taste in books and music -- had already found their places in the pews. There, I was surprised to find that I loved the liturgy. I grew up in charismatic churches, attended by an inordinate amount of former Catholics who left the faith of their families, declaring it stale, spiritually dead and too ritualistic to allow for any movement of the spirit. I grew up among ex-Catholic Catholic bashers.

When I began attending Catholic high school and was forced to attend mass semi-regularly, I was prepared to be bored and maybe even a bit offended. But I wasn't. I remember talking to my mom one day after school and telling her that I might have felt the spirit there in that multi-purpose auditorium where the services were held. Sometime between the short homily and communion, where I sat awkwardly with the Asian kids as our Catholic friends climbed over us to reach the aisle, I felt something like the hair-raising tingle that I knew only from prayer services and youth rallies.

But I guess I forgot about all this when I went away to Christian college. I settled back into the praise bands, projector screens and emotive worship songs. Though, I never could raise my hands or "speak in tongues" again.

So the liturgy I experienced at the Episcopal church reminded me of the quiet movement of the spirit I remembered feeling in high school, except this time I could actually participate in the eucharist. It took some time before my wife and I settled comfortably in the Episcopal church -- when we moved to New York we followed the requisite path to Redeemer, than to a Redeemer plant, before remembering, just at the nick of time, that we felt most at home as Episcopalians.

And there, in the two churches we've been actively involved in these past years -- first in Jersey City and now in Cambridge, Mass. -- I've been delighted to find many young post-evangelical types like me. They share my story of moving away from the churches they grew up in, searching around for a place to belong, and finally finding a home. But, thankfully, I don't just find people like me. In each of these churches, my wife and I have been delighted to be a part of richly diverse communities where we don't check our differences at the door, but celebrate them in eclectic masses filled with songs sung in tongues -- and here I mean tongues as in the languages of our fellow parishioners.

So, I found it difficult to square this admittedly anecdotal experience with Ross Douthat's death nell of a column in the New York Times this past weekend. I can't argue with the numbers, and Douthat is not the first to recount them. Certainly attendance in the Episcopal church is decreasing, but, as many of the critics of Douthat's piece have pointed out, church attendance is decreasing across the board. But what most disturbed me about Douthat's assessment is his suggestion that Episcopal church's self-conscious progressivism, as he calls it, is the cause of this decline. On first reading, I wanted to reject this. This is precisely what drew my friends and I to the church, I argued in my head.

Then, I stopped arguing. I started to square this assertion with some other data I'd read recently, and some that Douthat himself includes in his column. He notes, "The most successful Christian bodies have often been politically conservative but theologically shallow, preaching a gospel of health and wealth rather than the full New Testament message." And I remembered a conversation I had over breakfast in Tribeca with a fellow blogger of the more conservative persuasion. We agreed that conservative churches, for a number of reasons, are better at growing their numbers. I suggested that they do this by providing a salve for our most basic ills -- our fear of change and difference, our need to be told what to do, our aversion to gray areas.

If these are the churches that grow, should it be any surprise that a denomination that chooses to live in the gray, that welcomes diversity, and promises no respite from controversy and questioning, should see its numbers shrink at a greater rate than its conservative counterparts? And why are we measuring the success of what should be a counter-cultural institution by its popularity?

While I can't argue that the Episcopal church's membership is declining, I do take issue with several others of Douthat's poorly supported claims. It's always dangerous to make the kind of across the board assertions that he makes at the end of his second paragraph about the Episcopal church, "But it is flexible to the point of indifference on dogma, friendly to sexual liberation in almost every form, willing to blend Christianity with other faiths, and eager to downplay theology entirely in favor of secular political causes." This is particularly dangerous when talking about a denomination that has a great deal of flexibility at its core, as indicated (but not mentioned in Douthat's column) by the recent news out of The General Convention of the Episcopal Church that ministers have discretion over whether or not they choose to bless same sex unions.

But more annoying to me, perhaps because it hits closer to home, is his unsupported suggestion that "instead of attracting a younger, more open-minded demographic with these changes, the Episcopal Church's dying has proceeded apace." Though there is solid evidence that church attendance is decreasing (dying is, of course, just sensationalizing the matter), he provides no proof that the church is not attracting a younger, more open minded demographic. It is conceivable that while attendance is decreasing, young, open-minded people are becoming attracted to the church. Again, I know it's just anecdotal -- you can bet I'll be doing a bit of research on this -- but my experience works against Douthat's claim.

And I think it's bigger than me and my friends. Others have noticed the attraction that former-evangelicals feel toward liturgical worship, and many do find their home in the Episcopal church.

But the bottom line is, though it may seem self-evident that declining church attendance is evidence of something gone wrong, would we rather see churches that accommodate society's ills grow? Isn't it more likely that a faith that asks more than we can naturally give, that compels us to believe in things we can't see, and calls us to live in ways that are counter to our own self interests, would find itself at odds with the prevailing culture?

In my experience, the Episcopal church doesn't ask parishioners to agree wholesale with every precept in the Book of Common Prayer. Sometimes this is frustrating, as in a recent confirmation class I attended where a classmate intimated that she wasn't sure she believed in sin. The old evangelical in me wanted to shake her shoulders and suggest she leave. But mostly this means that we journey together, each at different places and constantly extending grace to one another. This is not a great growth model, but it sure looks a lot like the kingdom Jesus describes.

Sorry, Santorum: I Am Christian College-Educated and Liberal

2012-03-05T11:53:02-05:00

I get Rick Santorum's beef with higher education. When he calls President Obama a snob for wanting to make higher education a possibility for all people or when he rants about the liberal professors who try indoctrinate students, I get where he's coming from. I went to a Christian college for something very close to this reason.

Further, New York Times writers like Frank Bruni and Dick Cavett are right to draw a connection between Santorum's remarks on higher education and his own decision to home school his children. I wasn't home schooled, but I had the next closest thing: a private education at a tiny Christian school at which my parents, and the parents of many of my friends, served as the teachers. It was like a perpetual home school tupperware party.

The decision by my parents to give me this kind of education was part practical -- the public schools in the city I grew up in were subpar -- but also part reflective of Santorum's desire to protect children from the corrupting influence of the secular world. So, too, was my decision to forego applying to any of Boston's esteemed colleges and universities in favor of Gordon College, the small Christian liberal arts school 45 minutes north of the city that I ultimately attended.

And, you know, it kind of worked. Today, at 30 years old, I am still a Christian. My childhood and even teen and college years were relatively free of any of the kind of trouble that many of my peers find themselves in.

Although, come to think of it, Mr. Santorum might not see me as a success story of his educational philosophy after all.

While at Gordon -- while faithfully attending the required Bible classes and chapel services -- something strange happened. My politics, which, admittedly, weren't all that developed when I entered college, veered far left. Also, I began to understand the Bible primarily as a text, and to interpret it in much the same way I was taught to interpret texts in my literary criticism courses. My response to the tragedy of Sept. 11, 2001, which happened when I was a junior, was a sharp turn toward Christian pacifism. And, just out of Gordon, I ran straight to my first secular university to earn a Master's degree in creative writing.

Ironically, it was there, in my first public school, that I fully solidified my faith and finally made it my own.

So, what happened? Santorum thinks he understands why Obama pushes college. He explained his "snob" comment by saying, "[Obama] wants to remake you in his image. I want to create jobs so people can remake their children into their image, not his." My politics and values certainly look a lot more like Mr. Obama's, than either of my parents. I did all the right things according to Santorum, and still I ended up liberal.

Perhaps it would dismay Mr. Santorum to know that I teach college students now. In each of my classes, ranging from freshmen composition to advanced journalism courses, I tell my students that college isn't so much about the things that they learn, but the process of learning itself. That is, the real purpose of a college education is to learn how to think, and how to successfully engage and evaluate new ideas and concepts. Any successful college, whether it's Hampshire College (which often tops "most liberal" lists) or Gordon College, will teach its students how to think.

And, though the results typically do skew more more toward the liberalizing nature of a college education, this is not universally the case. I have many good friends who graduated from Gordon and either strengthened the beliefs of their conservative upbringings or chose a more middle-of-the-road approach to politics. One of these friends recently asked me, somewhat sarcastically, if I thought his college education failed because he resisted becoming liberal, and I told him that I did not believe it failed at all. He's a much smarter, more thoughtful conservative than the young firebrand who entered as a freshman.

Indeed, parents, Rick Santorum among them, want their children to share their beliefs and values. This is natural. But more than that, I know that they want their children to grow and be challenged, to see more of the world than they have, and to ultimately live good and fulfilling lives. And, as a recent AP story reports, most American parents still believe a college education is the way to achieve this.

Bashing college or bandying statistics to scare potential conservative voters by attempting to show that college educators want to indoctrinate students and strip them of their faith is harmful to the welfare of our country. If anything, this should prove that the last thing we need is less education.

The Real Value of a College Education

2012-02-23T17:35:55-05:00

Yesterday, it happened. A student hit me with the question that many educators dread, "When are we ever going to use this in life?"

I love this question. I don't dread it at all. I eat it up.

I had just shown my freshman composition class part two of the incredible "Everything is a Remix" video series by filmmaker Kirby Ferguson. The premise of the series is, as the title suggests, that everything comes from something else. The portion we watched yesterday shows side by side shots from the Star Wars films and the source material that George Lucas culled in order to create his movies. I'm not sure if Ferguson is aware of the textbook I use for this class, somewhat cheesily called Remix, but his video series provides the perfect multimedia companion to it.

But, based on the fact that my students read essays in Remix about celebrity culture, suburban living, video games, and Facebook, it's always just a matter of time before they question how any of this is relevant for their future. Oh, they enjoy the conversations we have in class, but I can always sense -- especially among the sharper students -- a growing worry that I'm wasting their time.

So, at some point in the semester (we're just about a week away from spring break at this point), someone will ask the inevitable question. She may have well lit a long cartoon fuse leading to a stack of TNT. I exploded.

"Why are you in college?" I asked.

"So I can get a job after," she answered.

"What's your major?"

"Social work."

"You want to be a social worker?"

"No," she said. "I'm switching to pre-med."

"You want to be a doctor."

"I don't know."

Got her. "Okay," I smirked, "assuming you decide you don't want to be a doctor, let's say you decide you want to go into banking or teaching or some other thing. Do you think you'll be able to get a job?"

"I guess. If I have a degree."

"So, even though your degree doesn't really apply to what you want to do, you still think it will get you a job?"

"I guess."

"I think you're right," I told her. "That is because the value of your college education isn't career training. No one is going to ask you what courses you took. That doesn't show up on your resume."

Blank stares from the class, so I continue, sounding more and more like a fiery Southern Baptist preacher but with a decidedly more liberal message.

"The value of a liberal arts college education -- to you, to employers -- is that you've spent four years in a place where you were forced to consider new ideas, to meet new people, to ask new questions, and to learn to think, to socialize, to imagine. If you graduate, you will get a degree, but if you are not a very different person from who you are today, then college failed."

I think they were shocked to hear me talking like this. But, I think they liked it a little too, to have someone put their entire experience in perspective.

I told them that by the time I graduated from my own Christian liberal arts college I was a changed person, a better person than the one who entered four years prior.

"What kind of person were you before college?" a particularly inquisitive student asked.

"A knucklehead," I replied.

I really believe this stuff. I know that this isn't a universal view about the value of college, but it's the reason I teach. I went on to explain the practical side of what we were doing as well. Because I teach writing, I can insist that the skills they pick up in my class will serve them well throughout the rest of their college careers as well as whatever jobs they end up in after. I made it clear -- as I have many times already throughout the semester -- that the concept of remix (studying the work of others, combining it with their own thoughts, and outputting a new creation) is how all good writing works. But all of that, I insisted, is secondary to the importance of changing and growing as a person in college.

This group of students caught me at a particularly pertinent time to launch into this lecture about the value of college; I just finished one of the better novels I've read in a long time, Jeffrey Eugenides' The Marriage Plot. If you're unfamiliar with the novel, it's best summarized by saying it's about a love triangle between three college students at Brown University. Madeleine is an English major who loves Romantic literature, Mitchell is a religious studies major who is in love with Madeleine but is hopelessly one of those guys that girls always consider "just friends." Leonard is Madeleine's boyfriend. He's a biology major and he suffers from manic-depression.

The Marriage Plot shows college as a time when students do precisely what I insisted college students do. In a review of the novel for Books and Culture, my friend and sometime editor Naomi Schaefer Riley writes this of college, "It was time that was supposed to be (at least in part) spent in pure intellectual pursuits, time to read the books that you probably wouldn't get to when you had a family to support. Time to think about big ideas and talk about them with friends in the middle of the night. And even, clichéd though it may sound, time to search for meaning in life."

Riley, who has written extensively about contemporary higher education, thinks this description refers to a distant past, "However college students are spending their time these days, they are not, generally speaking, engaged in this search."

Though Riley's probably right in the global sense -- she has, after all, been researching this stuff for over a decade now -- this belief about what college is supposed to be remains my inspiration to teach. It's what makes me want to push my students, stretch their minds, and even -- sometimes -- make them uncomfortable.

I believe in a college education for the same reason anybody believes in anything -- because it has worked for me. To be certain there is a lot that is wrong with higher education, but I take this as a challenge. To try to be something that is right about it.

I imagine that my inquisitor thought about what I said for a minute or two yesterday, and then I dismissed her, and then she went to lunch, and didn't think about it again. Which leads me to my favorite thing about this process of transformation that happens in college: it is magic. It's not quantifiable, there's hardly ever a specific moment when everything changes, it happens slowly over time. But if my colleagues and I do our work well -- the magic will happen.

This post originally appeared at Patrolmag.com.

The Necessary Mix of Religion and Politics

2011-12-29T15:23:57-05:00

Election seasons are prime for considering the relationship between religion and politics -- Kennedy's Catholicism, born-again Carter, Bush and the evangelical vote, Obama's pastor problem, and so on. But few campaigns in recent memory bring about as much hand wringing over religion as the current contest for the Republican nomination.

From Michelle Bachmann's reading list of obscure, purportedly "dominionist" authors, to Rick Perry's preemptive prayer service before announcing his candidacy, to Mitt Romney's Mormonism, the current slate of candidates gives rise to a plethora of fascinating religious considerations. Some, like Bachmann and Perry, use their religious affiliation -- evangelical Christian in both cases -- to their political advantage, rallying likeminded supporters with evangelistic fervor. While others, like Romney, downplay their affiliation in an effort to avoid alienating voters.

In the past, no matter what one's religious affiliation, there was a supposed general agreement among voters, politicians, and members of the press that all parties should remove their religious views from consideration in the political arena. That is, the so-called "separation of church and state" should apply equally to government officials as to the government itself.

This stance is rooted in Reformation and Enlightenment thinking and, as far as it applies to government, has served Western democracies well. The problem is, while it is possible to separate church and state in a ruling body, it is both impossible and undesirable to do so in a human body. Maintaining a pluralistic society and a secular state does not require citizens to divide themselves into believers on certain days and irreligious citizens on others.

Yet, we are told, this is precisely what politicians must do in order to keep from appearing to violate the separation of church and state. Take, for example, the proposal, issued a couple of months ago, by The Daily Beast blogger Andrew Sullivan of a kind of "libertarian Christianity." This, he suggests, is the opposite of what he has long referred to as "Christianism," which is marked by "the fusion of politics and religion for the advancement of political goals."

Consider, also, the New York Times op-ed from August by David Campbell and Robert Putnam in which they suggest that what marks the Tea Party is not their insistence on smaller government, but their desire to "mix religion and politics." They write, "this infusion of religion into politics" is precisely what "most Americans increasingly oppose."

But is it the mixing of religion and politics in general that Americans oppose, or could it be what R. R. Reno, editor-in-chief of First Things, identifies as "mingling certain kinds of religion with certain kinds of politics?"

Surely this is what most Americans mean when they say they don't want their politicians' religious beliefs to affect their political convictions. Politicians shouldn't be expected to fragment themselves, to somehow isolate their religious convictions from their political views. What should be expected, however, is for politicians to answer for their beliefs, as Bill Keller, executive editor of the New York Times suggested albeit somewhat harshly. Offering a more generous explanation of Keller's suggestion, Times columnist Ross Douthat followed up, "The separation of church and state in the United States has never separated religion from politics, and the 'private' beliefs of politicians have often had very public consequences."

Douthat's view marks a reeducation of the American public on what separation of church and state means when it comes to the religious identities of politicians. And, it would seem that this changing view is taking hold even among politicians themselves. In the recent Republican debate in Las Vegas, the moderator, CNN's Anderson Cooper, asked the candidates directly whether it is "acceptable to let the issue of a candidate's faith shape the debate." The question was prompted by yet another criticism of Romney's Mormonism, this time by a pastor affiliated with Rick Perry.

The candidates unanimously agreed that questions regarding the role of religion in the formation of one's values and the influence on decision-making are fair game. Newt Gingrich, who has had a somewhat rocky relationship with the religious right, said, "There's a very central part of your faith in how you approach public life. And I, frankly, would be really worried if somebody assured me that nothing in their faith would affect their judgments..."

But, Mitt Romney added, one's religious affiliation shouldn't be the deciding factor in one's candidacy. He concluded, "The founders of our country went to great lengths, and even put it in our Constitution, that we would not choose people for public office based on their religion."

Indeed, we can consider a politician's religious views without elevating them to the level of deciding factor, but acknowledging the link and using it beneficially is key. So suggested University of Notre Dame professor R. Scott Appleby in a recent panel discussion considering the spiritual impact of 9/11 at the Templeton-Cambridge seminars on Science and Religion. When reached for further comment, Appleby wrote, "There is a growing awareness not only that religion is not going away, but that many of the world's greatest challenges will not be addressed effectively without partnerships between governments and religious communities." We must stop pretending that politicians can or should be willing to divide themselves into religious people on some days, and political people on others.

Professor Appleby is right; most Americans value religion, and thus it is not a pretense of separation we want from our politicians, but honest dialogue about how their religious beliefs can and should influence their political convictions.

Occupy Pessimism

2011-11-30T12:03:23-05:00

There are two thoughts swirling around and around in my head today -- two seemingly opposing view points, voices from members of my generation who see the world as it is and call foul. The first voice belongs to Thomas Day, an Iraq war veteran and graduate student at the University of Chicago. Last Friday he wrote a powerful essay for The Washington Post's "On Faith" section entitled "Penn State, my final loss of faith." The faith he lost is not in God, but, as he plainly states, "I have fully lost faith in the leadership of my parents' generation."

Day grew up in State College, benefitted from the work of Jerry Sandusky's Second Mile foundation, and, though he notes that he was never harmed by Sandusky, writes from a place of frustration and hurt, to great effect. He lists a litany of reasons that the leadership of our parents' generation has failed us. He notes that in the wake of September 11 when we needed strong direction, what we got instead was encouragement to shop. He references the downgraded credit rating, the millions of unemployed members of our generation, and the gargantuan debt we are strapped with. He offers these all in service of his point that the world we are inheriting is nearly unrecognizable from the one our parents were born into.

Day pledges to continue to respect his elders, but wants to "politely tell them, 'Out of my way.'" He is not looking for a Joshua figure to emerge from our parents generation as, he concludes, "They've lost my faith."

The other voice I've been entertaining belongs to Rachel Signer, a friend of a friend who wrote a moving piece about her experience with Occupy Wall Street for the religion website "Killing the Buddha." Signer's starting point, a position of skepticism, very much mirrors my own initial posture regarding the Occupy Movement. But when Signer began attending Occupy Wall Street's General Assemblies and marches, she found a kind of community in Zucotti Park that she had been unable to find elsewhere. Though each night she returns home to her apartment, she notes that, for her, the OWS community is her true home. She writes of the park, "This place where there is nothing to do but occupy, which is really everything we need to do and everything you want to be; it's everything."

Day's reflection, which grows out of the events at Penn State, and Signer's, prompted by the Occupy Movement, start from the same place, the dissatisfaction that my generation feels with the world we inherited. Day's piece, however, seems to end on a pessimistic note. There are moments wherein it seems he may be rallying his peers, but he doesn't quite get there. Signer's piece, on the other hand, tries to land on an upswing, a found community in an otherwise fragmented world.

But the truth is that they are both equally pessimistic.

The Occupy Movement, which suffered a serious blow with the police sweep of Zuccotti Park, embodies the frustration that Day expresses, but it only gives off the appearance of doing something about it. We all agree that the world is not as it should be and so we write and occupy, we argue and complain, we chant and sing and march and, in the end, we don't actually try to change anything. Perhaps the most oppressing legacy of our parents' generation is that despite their best efforts to encourage us to be whatever we want to be and to follow our dreams, we turned out to be mostly pessimistic.

Thus, these two voices harmonize our frustration, but their song, which once carried promise, is coalescing into a drone, a monotone chant.

But then a third voice sounds. I begin to hear the words of my parish priest who, just this past Sunday, amidst the cries of brought-to-be-baptized-babies, taught on Jesus' parable of the talents, sometimes called the parable of the investors. In this difficult and depressing parable, a master entrusts three servants with some money. Two of the servants invest and reap a profit, but the third, afraid to invoke the wrath of the master by potentially losing his money, buries it in the ground. When the master returns he is pleased with those who have invested, and angry with the servant who did not.

It is easy to misunderstand this parable as an approbation of Wall Street and investment banking, but, as my priest explained, it is actually about one's outlook. The third servant takes stock of his situation and is afraid; he chooses to do nothing rather than risk facing his master's anger. And he is punished.

My generation, whether writing critical essays about our parents' generation, or choosing "nothing to do but occupy," are burying our master's talents when the times call for us to invest our gifts. I've come to believe in the promise of the Occupy Movement, and I've long advocated for more of my generation to take to their keyboards in an effort to write change into effect. In both cases, however, we have to go beyond complaining and camping, we need to find a way to advocate and to act. Admittedly, this won't be easy; it will require creative solutions often found in unexpected places.

This piece originally appeared at Patheos.com.

Christian Rock Redux

2011-10-20T11:36:42-04:00

As another summer comes to a close, so too does another music festival season. The fans are left only with memories of bodies packed tightly together before a glimmering stage, rock gods screaming into microphones the words they've so longed to hear, new friends made in sprawling autograph lines and hot-off-the-press merchandise featuring slogans such as, "I like girls that love Jesus."

Wait, what?

Sure there are plenty of mainstream summer rock festivals, but I'm talking about Christian rock. I'm talking about the Creation Festival, held in Pennsylvania since 1979, and Cornerstone Festival, in Illinois since 1984. Or, in my neck of the woods, the relative newcomer, SoulFest, which set up camp in New Hampshire in 1998.

Back in 1996, when I was a freshman in high school, my best friend and I, my sister and her friends, and, of course, our parents, trekked down to Pennsylvania for the Creation Festival. My mom and dad, old Jesus People from the 70s, had attended the very first Creation, so for them it was a kind of homecoming. But the music of the mid-90s was a far cry from the hippie/folky sounds of their day. In fact, 1995-1996 was arguably the pinnacle of Contemporary Christian Music, or CCM.

In 1995, DC Talk, perhaps the most popular Christian rock band of all time, released their earth-shattering (well, by Christian music standards) album "Jesus Freak" on which they once and for all showed what CCM was really all about, mimicking the trends of secular pop music. DC Talk to that point had been, to the best of anyone's reckoning, a rap and R&B group. But, with the release of "Jesus Freak," DC Talk ceased to be a rap group. The title track of the record is decidedly a shinier, hyper-produced version of Seattle grunge. But it's the only "grunge" song on the album; the rest borrows from every other genre or artist popular in the mid-90s. Did you love "Kiss From a Rose"-era Seal? DC Talk did that. Covers of Broadway show tunes your thing? They had that too. To that point, imitation was the essence of CCM.

But, another significant record was released that same year. Jars of Clay, a band from Illinois, was distinctly different from the previous stock of Christian artists, and, at least for a while, it seemed that their brand of honest folk-rock had appeal even outside of CCM; "Flood," the first single off their 1995 self-titled debut, was somewhat of a crossover hit.

In 1996, in Pennsylvania, standing in the disabled persons section (my father had just undergone a surgery, and we capitalized) looking up at Jars of Clay, it was clear that they were taking Christian music in a different direction. Amongst swirling rumors of CCM's "Jesus' per Minute (JPM)" standard, which meant that lyrics had to meet a certain number of Christian references, Jars' lyrics were far less overt, even subtle at times.

As history would have it, the mid-to-late 90s wasn't just a tumultuous time in the Christian music industry, but in the music industry as a whole. The decade that ended with Napster, also, for all intents and purposes, ended the way the music business had been run, and CCM had an especially difficult time with the transition.

Though the festivals continue, and many of the major labels have survived, in recent years a number of young Christian and formerly-Christian writers have memorialized the music of their youth. A couple of months ago, in Guernica, Megan O'Gieblyn wrote of "a childhood in Christian pop." Her article made laps around my circle of friends for its frightening familiarity; we all lived it. And, in November 2010, my friend Joel Heng Hartse, a music critic, published Sects, Love, and Rock & Roll in which he shares his experience as a lifelong music lover and Christian.

Though the genre known as CCM is irrevocably changed, many see this as a good thing. Another friend, Kevin Gosa is a saxophonist in the Roots-Chamber Music outfit, The Fretful Porcupine, with collaborator (and Boston folk scene celebrity) Jake Armerding. The two recently performed three sets at this past summer's SoulFest and reported better than expected crowds at the smaller venues they played, far away from the main stage where many of the popular acts from the mid-90s were still playing the hits of their heyday.

DC Talk has dissolved, but their lead singer, Toby Mac, has a successful solo career and performed at Creation this past summer, and Michael Tait, another DC Talker has joined with Newsboys, also a mainstay of 90s CCM. But, as the burgeoning success of less mainstream bands like The Fretful Porcupine -- who perform instrumental music (no lyrics, no JPMs) -- can attest, another breed of Christian music, created more in the image of Jars of Clay than DC Talk, is still very much alive and well. Just as in mainstream music, the do-it-yourself model reigns, and talent and steeliness, rather than marketing and mimicry, determine long-term success.

So, see you at next year's SoulFest?

Occupy the Internet

2011-10-18T12:51:30-04:00

Nine years ago, in 2002, I got on a bus bound for New York City to take part in a protest against the Iraq war. About a year before I had found pacifism, and that transformative experience was, by then, starting to manifest itself in my life in myriad ways. Upon arriving in Manhattan, I walked east from the Port Authority bus terminal and tried to get as close as possible to the UN headquarters, the epicenter of the protests. But the police blocked the growing crowds at Third Avenue, so right there 33rd and 3rd I joined the Asians for Peace and we chanted and sang and drummed and prayed that the clouds of war that were growing on the horizon wouldn't become a reality.

And we all know how well that worked out.

So, I don't mind saying that I was jaded by that whole experience. I also don't mind saying that I'm easily jaded. But, I'm also hopelessly optimistic. I want to be a part of a movement for positive change that works, that takes hold, that has effect.

That's why, last Friday afternoon after I was done teaching for the day, I took the subway to downtown Boston to see Occupy Boston for myself. I exited at the South Station T stop expecting to find a raucous crowd of protesters like I'd seen in footage from New York. I don't know if I imagined that the protest was ongoing, all day and all night, or that musicians and other popular figures were just hanging out, but what I found was a rather subdued tent community, organized neatly around a statue of Mahatma Gandhi. I wandered up down the makeshift "streets" reading signs posted on tents, eavesdropping on conversations, and trying to get a handle on the character of this protest.

I first heard of the Occupy Wall Street Movement last month, a few days before it was set to begin. My friend and sometime editor Nathan Schneider was participating in and covering the event for his website Waging Nonviolence, as well as for other media outlets like Democracy Now. I read his reports hungrily, eager to ascertain the group's intentions and demands. I resonated with their anger and frustration. I understood their complaint, but I still wasn't sure what they intended to do about it. But if anything, I thought, it would be helpful to put a consistent reminder outside of the offices of Wall Street, to let those who work there, most of whom are honest and decent people, know that their greedy actions and those of their colleagues, bosses, and subordinates were having a tremendous and often negative effect on too many working Americans.

Attention to the occupation was slow going at the start. Those few Twitter friends in my feed who knew about it complained about this lack of attention in those early days. But, sure enough, over time the media's attention shifted in their direction and, as Occupy Boston indicates, the idea caught on in other cities.

But, for me, the questions that I had in the beginning still remained. I wasn't sure what the plan was. What were they trying to accomplish? I hoped that by visiting the Boston site for myself, I would have the opportunity to learn.

Some of the people I saw gathered in Dewey Square in Boston fit the stereotype that has been cast on them in the media. I saw dreadlocked college kids, veterans -- perhaps war veterans, but definitely protest veterans -- playing folk songs, as well as a few less obvious peaceniks. In snippets of conversations I heard oft-repeated refrains, "Because of the media . . ." and ". . . then we'd have all the energy we need!" And I sympathized. I agreed. But I didn't join.

It occurred to me that all the criticism of the movement, both from people like me who are sympathetic to their general cause, as well as from those on the right, is rooted in the sad fact that the protesters are trying to be something that they are not. Take a look or a listen to the consistent criticism. Many point to the fact that the occupiers are inconsistent. There is an image floating around online contrasting the anger they direct at corporations with the plethora of brands that the protesters are wearing and using. On the other side, the occupiers are accused of not having a clear goal, and thus causing disruption without providing any way to satiate their concerns.

Both of these criticisms stem from the fact that Occupy is a mid-20th-century protest staged in the 21st-century. Sure, it incorporates social media, but aside from that, it is very much an imitation of '60s protests -- another piece of nostalgia from a generation that loves to look back almost as much as we like to look inward.

Their concerns are right on, and no one is really unsure as to the kinds of things they would propose, if they got around to proposing things. But they aren't telling a compelling story because chants aren't a very good storytelling medium. Neither are tweets. In fact, Twitter is a natural partner to protests such as this one (not to mention the Arab Spring) because tweets work in much the same way as chants: short, pithy, and most effective when repeated by a number of people. But, ultimately, tweets and chants function like bumper stickers; they allude to a greater story but fail to tell it. In the 21st century, we need stories, not slogans.

In the '60s, getting the attention of the national media was the only way to get your message heard by people across the country. But this is no longer the case. Rather than sitting in tents, holding handmade signs and occasionally chanting, the occupiers should be occupying the Internet -- using the countless avenues that technology has made available to them to tell compelling stories. Fortunately, some are doing this as a companion action to the physical protest, "We Are the 99 Percent," for example.

At Occupy Boston I noted that many of the young people there are around my age. This is my generation's time to speak up, but we're doing it the way our parents' generation did. In the 21st century we have better options than pitching tents in public parks and getting arrested.

Take to the internet. Take to the airwaves. Let's get out of the tents and onto the web. We know what we want and we have the means to say it. We have 21st century problems that need 21st century solutions. I would love to see my peers in the Occupy movement join us here.

This post originally appeared at Patheos.com.

Osama Bin Laden at the Nexus of God and Man's Justice

2011-05-02T13:07:50-04:00

Osama Bin Laden was killed last night. My wife and I were just about to go to bed when one last cursory glance at Facebook and Twitter told me the news. We turned on the television in time to see President Obama finishing his speech, and then it was back to the social networks for commentary.

I know why Americans were celebrating. I've seen the pictures of the people outside the White House, and, just over a mile from my apartment, I know there was a large group gathered at the World Trade Center site in lower Manhattan. Bin Laden has been America's enemy for more than a decade, and now he is no more. It feels like justice, and certainly it is a form of human justice. We understand justice to be giving someone what he deserves. But for Christians who believe that the wages of sin are death, this is a precarious definition.

Sarah Pulliam Bailey, an editor for Christianity Today, put up a very quick roundup of Christian responses she'd gathered from around Twitter as the news unfolded. The posts were predictable. Derek Webb, in his measured way, tweeted, "Don't celebrate death, celebrate justice." Jordan Sekulow suggested some celebration music, and Mark Driscoll wrote that the cheering crowds should remind us that "justice is glorious & comes ultimately through Jesus cross or hell," before taking an ill-timed and shameless jab at Rob Bell, "Justice wins."

It is clear that, from all angles, the killing of bin Laden is understood as justice, but I am going to suggest that we've conflated our human understanding of justice with God's justice. That Osama bin Laden is dead does not make the world a better place. It does not make us safer. It does not somehow magically remove a quotient of evil from the face of the earth. Russell Arben Fox, writing on the religious and moral implications of bin Laden's death for Front Porch Republic says it well, "The moral plane of the universe is not somehow improved by the killing of a man."

Death begets more death. Killing creates more killers. True, bin Laden will never again mastermind a plan to kill anyone, but someone else will. Someone else just did in the time it took to write that last sentence. And again. And again.

If we could accomplish God's justice by killing people, if the death of an evildoer at the hand of another human is what would bring about justice, Jesus would not have come to die, but to kill. If we could eventually eliminate evil from the world and mete out justice by the sword, Jesus could have wielded it wildly during his brief stay on earth and then, rather than leave us with the Holy Spirit, he might have empowered his disciples with some futuristic weaponry.

But that's not how God's justice works. And it's a good thing, too. If the punishment for evil was physical death, we would all be dead. In fact, death is the consequence of evil, but for saving grace in the person of Jesus. Death at the hands of another human is not God's justice. It was Jesus himself who warned, "All who draw the sword will die by the sword." This is not metaphorical language. This is a truism that was true before Jesus came, and remains true long after.

Thus, we don't exercise God's justice by issuing out the death we believe evildoers deserve. In fact, we hardly ever exercise God's justice at all because it is so counterintuitive to our construction of the concept. I'll be the first to say that I fail in this regard, so I'm not going to ask any readers to do better. But, I believe that what I can ask, what we can do, is understand the difference and stop conflating the two.

Osama bin Laden was evil. I still twinge with pain when I remember the way I felt for months after Sept. 11, 2001. Here on earth, he deserved to die. But, then, here on earth, so do I.

This post originally appeared at Patrolmag.com.

The Deadly Serious Connection Between Evangelicalism and Homosexuality

2011-01-31T17:03:39-05:00

Last Thursday was a bad day. Two powerful blasts of bad news damn near knocked me off my feet, coming as they did within minutes of each other. Two deaths, and an unfortunate connection.

A good friend of mine from high school passed away Wednesday night. We haven't had much contact since graduating; we reconnected on Facebook not long ago and, in viewing our interactions there, I see that most communication we've had was his yearly "happy birthday" messages to me. Unrequited, I'm afraid.

Back in high school, he and some of the other guys used to go to youth group with me. They weren't evangelical Christians like I was; they were raised in Catholic families and were fellow inmates at our all male Catholic high school. None of them really liked going to my church, I don't think. It was too strange for them. I was too obviously evangelizing. But we didn't have many friends outside of each other, and I'm sure that's why they came.

My friend was bisexual. This all came out years after high school, and in the time since we reconnected he lived his life right out in the open on Facebook. He had some trouble with drugs and alcohol in those intervening years, too, but seemed to have it under control. Ultimately, from the time spent in the homophobic halls of an all-male Catholic school through the rest of his too-short life, I get the impression that due to the competing pressures regarding his sexuality, he was never comfortable in his own skin. He described himself, casually, as "a lil bit of this and a lil bit of that."

I don't know what he thought about me after all those years of trying to "witness" to him, of being judgmental about petty teenage taboos like swearing and smoking. There is a lot I regret about the kind of Christian I was in high school. I can only hope he didn't think I judged him still, or thought any less of him after he came out. I can only hope, but I'm not so sure.

Also on Wednesday night, in Uganda, a country I visited while living in Kenya, another man, David Kato, died. He was murdered. Though the police are blaming his death on a robbery, those who knew him and knew his story are drawing the obvious connection between his death and the fact that his picture was recently featured on the front page of a Ugandan newspaper under the headline "Hang Them."

He was gay.

Already, people are assigning blame for Kato's death to the U.S. evangelical preachers who visited Uganda a few years ago and stoked the fire of anti-gay ire in the country, and to the groups in the U.S. that continue to support that cause. It has been widely publicized that after the evangelical preachers visited Uganda, hosting rallies and talks, some Ugandan legislators proposed a bill that would make hanging the penalty for a person found to be homosexual.

The extent to which the preachers who have been frequently accused by name are guilty of Kato's death is unclear and probably immeasurable. But what is clear is that Christians, and evangelicals in particular, are guilty of demonizing homosexuals. We are told -- despite Jesus' example -- that it is up to us to throw the first stone of judgment at those we deem sinners. In fact, on Thursday, with unfortunate timing, Albert Mohler wrote, responding to Joel Osteen's nearly forced pronouncement that he believes homosexuality is sin, that "those who express confidence in the Bible's teaching" will have to make such a judgment.

But when we do this, we put an unbearable burden on the shoulders of our gay brothers and sisters. Even the most "love the sinner, hate the sin" believer among us is guilty. We have mistakenly labeled homosexuality as an unforgivable sin, a malfunction, a distortion or a disease. And we are guilty of a million counts of making life miserable for so many people, and of making life unlivable for countless others.

I'm calling for an end to this life threatening judgmentalism. I'm calling for a moratorium on debates over what qualifies as sin in other peoples' lives. I'm calling for a change in priorities, a shift back to what we should have been doing all along. I'm calling for love, acceptance and a global admission that we have wronged so many people. Ultimately, I'm pleading with my fellow Christians to change -- to make a marked transition from being the most judgmental and angry to the most accepting and loving. From being the police of others' morality to the bearers of others' burdens. Peoples' lives, it's clear, are at stake.

Originally published at Patrolmag.com.

The Unfortunate Effects Apocalyptic Beliefs Can Have On Morality

2010-12-05T19:00:18-05:00

When I was a kid I knew The World was going to Hell in a hand basket. I didn't know what that phrase meant, still don't really, but I knew that it was one of the only times I could get away with saying hell, because it wasn't swearing. The World was actually going there.

Perhaps a couple definitions are necessary here at the outset. In my conservative, evangelical-before-we-knew-what-evangelical-was upbringing, Hell meant that very literal -- perhaps underground -- place where real flames burn real, bad people forever. And The World meant non-Christians, as in "be in the world, but not of it." Evangelicals often refer to any not-usses, any thems, as The World.

So, The World was on a steady decline to the pits of Hell, which began, well, when it all began, when the literal Adam and Eve ate the literal apple, handed them by the literal snake who literally was Satan in disguise and sin entered into the previously pristine world. The thing about this decline though, is that we were all okay with it. It's not that we wanted to live in a world that was getting worse; it was just that we didn't want to live in The World at all. And though there are many variations of this belief, typical evangelical eschatology says that in order for Jesus to come back the world has to get so bad that the only solution is to scoop up his followers, burn the whole place down and start again.

This being the case, we knew that what we were seeing around us, the fact that more and more swear words slipped through the FCC's slackening grip and made their way into our homes via our televisions, that more magazine covers revealed more skin, that PG movies were more like PG-13 movies, that a Democrat got elected, and then had a public affair, and then stayed in office; these were all signs that things were going according to plan.

The only problem, as far as my 8-year-old self was concerned, was that things weren't moving along quickly enough. My parents used to tell me stories about how in the 1970s they were certain that it was all coming to an end. But then Reagan became president and, I guess, things started looking up again for the good guys. I had to do something to help speed up the process.

My solution came in the form of one of the greatest evils of the 80s: MTV. I wasn't allowed to watch music videos, not even the harmless VH1 variety. Clearly, I concluded, the more viewers MTV had, the sooner Armageddon would happen. Therefore I resolved to make any and all of my non-Christian friends tune in often, and sometimes, even, when I was sitting on the couch beside them. I would hand a friend the remote to my family's old JC Penney television set, tell him to type in 3 and 6 and when MTV blinked on the screen and Axl Rose screamed "Take me down to Paradise City..." my friend would turn to me with a horrified look on his face and say something like, "But we're not allowed to watch this." To which I would respond, "I'm not, because I'm a Christian, but I think it's okay for you."

Diabolical, wasn't I? In the end, all this accomplished for me was a few spankings and an uncompromising love of popular culture.

Certainly this is religion as seen through a child's eyes, but it is also emblematic of the kind of Christianity I grew up in -- one so concerned with individual salvation that its very standards of morality are a means toward that end. This is the same morality that cares nothing for the earth because it will eventually be destroyed, or for those who are not receptive to evangelism as their fates are sealed.

This morality really is amorality, a void where actual care and concern for what is right should be -- rules and regulations in place of grace and virtue. If there is a list of activities that one must do or not do in order to achieve personal salvation, this list must necessarily trump everything else. I must do whatever is necessary to secure paradise for myself. My morality matters most; yours, very little.

As much as the people in my church hated the idea of relativism -- which they saw as a kind of ultimate evil that, if ever it were to take hold, would assure that there would be no ultimate evil - the relative nature of the preferred evangelical morality seems to have gone completely unnoticed.

But, Christianity is not really about personal salvation. As a Christian, my life should matter less to me than the lives of others. In this way, too, my sense of morality must reflect this understanding: it is not what I can do for myself that is of value, but how I can make life better for those around me. Or, as Hegel prescribes in his Lectures on the Philosophy of History, striving toward spiritual perfection in one's own life is not enough, rather the Christian believer must actively transform the physical world into a place more habitable for "free, spiritual beings."

This shift fortunately corresponds to a larger shift that is taking place among evangelicals, or post-evangelicals as many of us who have walked away from the warehouses and former department stores that served as the evangelical churches we were raised in are often identified as now. If evangelicalism was concerned, first and foremost, with personal salvation, we must make a conscious effort to shift our attentions outward; not to police the morality of others but to mind how our own actions help or hurt them, to ensure our motivations are right.

Granted, this outlook isn't going to speed up the onslaught of the Apocalypse, but it might make the time between now and Armageddon that much more pleasant for everyone.

Is There a Future for Evangelicalism?

2010-09-13T06:57:00-04:00

A few weeks ago, the religion website Patheos.com featured a conversation on the "Future of Evangelicalism." The discussion was the sixth in their series on the future of religion, which had already considered two other branches of Christianity, Catholicism and Mainline Protestantism, in addition to Hinduism, Buddhism and Judaism. To that point, however, the evangelical series is slated to have the most contributors, 32, a good deal more than its close cousin and nearest competitor, the Mainline Protestantism series.

That there are so many opinions on the future of evangelicalism is telling. Compared to the other faiths considered, it is the most amorphous, and, some would argue, the most in danger of becoming extinct. On Easter Sunday in 2006, Michael Luo published an essay in The New York Times that shed light on what then were growing fissions between evangelicals. He referenced a poll conducted by the Pew Forum on Religion and Public Life, which separated evangelicals into three camps: traditionalist, centrist and modernist. The piece concludes with the assertion that some evangelical leaders had been discussing whether to dispense with the title "evangelical" altogether.

Over the next couple of years, much was made of the fissions and cracks that were beginning to show on the surface of evangelicalism, most often along the lines that the Pew Forum survey highlighted. Not long after, many writers and pundits, both within evangelicalism and without, began to pronounce evangelicalism dead. Among those tolling the death knell was the late Michael Spencer, better known as the "Internet Monk," and the magazine I edit, Patrol Magazine, in an editorial entitled "Get Over It."

Certainly those of us whose who perceived evangelicalism to be in decline were onto something, but a closer look reveals that it may not be as simple as proclaiming, "Evangelicalism is dead." In order to understand what is really going on, it is important to understand how we got to this point.

Though evangelicalism has been around in some form or another since the Reformation, by most accounts contemporary evangelicalism, or what Harold Ockenga, founder of the National Association of Evangelicals, called "neo-evangelicalism," is understood to have begun in the 1940s as a kind of middle ground between the fundamentalism of mainline denominations and the liberalization of Christianity. Never at any point in the movement's history has their been a unified definition or set standards that mark evangelicals; though some have tried to create rigid classifications, evangelism has remained fluid.

So amorphous was the movement that many of us who grew up in what now are considered evangelical congregations didn't even know we were evangelicals. The rash of so-called non-denominational churches, which evangelicalism made way for and the Jesus Movement of the 1970s spawned, spent much of their existence as free-floating, undefined entities until that other amorphous grouping of Christians, the religious right, began to absorb them, making it possible, in the early 80s, for the term religious right to become synonymous with evangelical. I sat for a total of 16 years of Christian schooling, including four years at an evangelical college, before I even knew I was an evangelical.

But then, as soon as I knew I was identified as such, a funny thing happened that was not unique to me: I began to resist the classification. The period around the 2004 presidential election and the couple of years that followed, arguably the height of evangelicalism's political power, may have been the closest that the movement ever came to being definable. Even then, however, the mainstream media defined the term with no regard for the theological and traditional criteria that people within the movement often considered. Drunk on the power, however, what evangelicals believed was of less importance to them than what they stood for or against politically. And it is this identity, created not from within but from observers on the outside, that most people in the United States recognize as evangelical.

By this account, evangelicalism began its rapid decline at the very moment it reached its most crystallized form. It was then that many within the movement had to reconcile their beliefs and values with an external set of criteria, perhaps for the first time. Though many evangelicals fit neatly within the new popular perception, large swaths, defined in the Pew poll as Centrists and Modernists, began to pull away. The result of this was the infighting, to which many periodicals and bloggers brought attention, over new hot-button issues like the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan and the environment.

By the time the 2008 elections rolled around, the right-pulling political power for which politicians had depended on evangelicals in previous decades was barely seen, stretched as the movement had become. For the first time since Jimmy Carter, and in a far greater magnitude than back then, young evangelicals rallied around a Democratic candidate, and as a result it became a lot more difficult to talk about the "evangelical vote."

Inasmuch as evangelicalism as most people understand it today really came into being after the mainstream media sanctioned its existence, it has died. Thus, it was dead the moment it was most alive. What we see in conversations like the one that took place at Patheos.com is the awkward struggle to define a unified future by people who share a common faith but not a common practice. Perhaps the greatest good that will come from this kind of consideration will be the realization that one evangelical future is not possible, for one evangelicalism never actually existed.