Kent Hayden, M.Div.2013-05-24T05:54:25-04:00Kent Hayden, M.Div.http://www.huffingtonpost.com/author/index.php?author=kent-hayden-mdivCopyright 2008, HuffingtonPost.com, Inc.HuffingtonPost Blogger Feed for Kent Hayden, M.Div.Good old fashioned elbow grease.Firepower: What's Really at Stake in the Gun Debatetag:www.huffingtonpost.com,2013:/theblog//3.25522892013-01-28T11:47:26-05:002013-03-30T05:12:01-04:00Kent Hayden, M.Div.http://www.huffingtonpost.com/kent-hayden-mdiv/
Every act of weapons regulation is a reduction of the power of private citizens. This is its purpose. It is the best reason to support it; it is the best reason to resist it.
The American republic was designed with a decentralized and limited government, but it also exists, like all government, to hold power where private citizens holding absolute power produces evil. The best example of a necessary limitation of private citizens' power is in the police power of the state. Many of the oldest legal codes were developed to stop feuds and vigilantism by taking the power of criminal judgment and civil restitution out of the hands of individuals. The power to enforce the law rightfully resides exclusively with the state.
But the American system was designed to protect other powers from being allocated to the state. The bill of rights protects the power of free speech, assembly, press, and free exercise of religion. It also protects the power to keep and bear arms for a well-regulated militia. These powers are to be kept with the people to prevent the government from becoming self-serving. They ensure that when the rights of the people are limited, they are limited by the will of the people.
None of these powers, however, is absolute. One cannot evoke the First Amendment to defend his shouting "fire!" in a theater. Nor is a person's power to own a bazooka protected by the Second. While the powers to speak freely and to bear arms are generally maintained, they are and will always be subject to regulation. Some power must be taken from individuals for the health and safety of society.
So the question to ask with each proposed regulation is whether the power which the regulation would take from individuals is more like the power to shout "fire" in a crowded theater, or more like the power to express dissenting political ideas without fear of majoritarian oppression. This is an imprecise evaluation on which intelligent people of good will can disagree.
The question is not resolved by asking whether the power was known at the time the constitution was drafted. Blogging was not, but is rightly protected by the First Amendment. Nor is it simplified by asking whether the regulation is an encroachment on individual liberty. All regulation is, and much regulation is necessary. The issue can not be settled with dramatic rhetoric or appeals to the pain of those who have suffered from recent loss. It comes down to a rather mundane calculation about the good to be gained by marginal adjustments to the current allocation of power.
The power to own an automatic rifle allows people to kill effectively, efficiently, and quickly. Taking this power from free individuals is a serious thing. Not because this power serves some function -- the likelihood of a military dictatorship arising in the U.S. is about the same as the likelihood of a Zombie Apocalypse, and either way, an AR-15 isn't going to save you -- but because the loss of this power is an injury per se. The preservation of individual power is fundamental to every free society and a self-justifying good.
But that good might be outweighed by the evil that it facilitates. Human nature is complex and in places, dark. The preservation of individual power facilitates the imposition of an individual's will on the world. This is what allows great people to flourish and broken people to destroy.
Great people have flourished without bazookas and the power to yell "fire" in theaters. They will flourish without the right to keep an AR-15. So have broken people destroyed without bazookas and the power to yell "fire." So will they do without an assault rifle. But there is a chance that the destruction they wreak will be less terrible.
The loss of power in the individual that a regulation represents is an injury that everyone committed to the maintenance of a free society should be willing to acknowledge. I am convinced, however, that it is justified by the reduction in efficiency that it might cost those who would use it for evil.
Unlike the loss of individual power, the potential benefit to society from a new gun regulation is not a self-evident good. It must be convincingly demonstrated that the probable result of the regulation will outweigh the injury to individual power. Many people argue that it is futile to limit legal access to guns because criminals don't follow the law. I think that this hopelessness is a symptom of weak imagination. I have faith that our legislature can draft a law that will effectively make it more difficult to kill with military efficiency. And I think it is worth the cost of my power to do so for them to try.]]>The Bad Faith of American Exceptionalismtag:www.huffingtonpost.com,2011:/theblog//3.8050162011-01-07T09:00:56-05:002011-05-25T18:25:24-04:00Kent Hayden, M.Div.http://www.huffingtonpost.com/kent-hayden-mdiv/
My generation has, at a relatively early age, been faced with the reality of our vulnerability, not just as individuals, but as a country. We have faced the existential crisis of seeing clearly what American exceptionalism does not mean. And we have been charged with moving ourselves and the future of this country forward in light of the void where our false sense of security used to be. The struggle to come to terms with this, and to learn how to fall asleep without assurances has been one of the primary tasks of our collective act of defining ourselves. We must comprise an America that is heroic, just and moral, and that is fully aware of its fragility.
The recognition of your own finitude, your own vulnerability, confronts you with a choice. You can accept the fact that the monsters of extremism, corporate exploitation, and social injustice are real, and you can live in a way that will help protect the vulnerable, recognizing that you number among them. You can stand up and impose justice upon the void. Or you can pull the blankets over your head and tell yourself that you're special.
Fundamentalism, of any kind, is the refuge of a coward. It is the denial of one's share in the darker corners of the human condition. And the greatest threat to the exclusivity and exceptionality of a coward is a tear in the blankets under which he is hiding.
Certain voices in our media and even our government are making a lot of money sewing up torn blankets. Recently, Glenn Beck called for drawing "a line in the sand" to "decide who we are, and what we are capable of," adding, "I will not accept that America's best days are behind her, that there is no such thing as American exceptionalism."
The arteries of our communications are clogged with such voices howling about a mythical good-old-days. They may want their country back -- meaning, run by white, right-wing Christians. They may want their Jesus back -- meaning, stripped of his call for social justice. But most of all, they want their power back. They want their false sense of control over the future back. They want the assurances of their mother as she tucked them into bed that everything will be all right. But such a worldview, such exceptionalism at the expense of truth, is a luxury we can no longer afford. It is purchased with the exclusion of the weak and the denial of our own weakness.
We must develop a counterpoint to the bad faith of this kind of exceptionalism. We must develop a faith in ourselves as we really are, with all our strengths and weaknesses; a faith in our country, despite the long struggles for justice we have yet to win; and for many of us, a faith in a God who does not support the prerogatives of the privileged, but challenges us to risk our security for the weak.
American greatness is not a given. Our destiny is no longer so "manifest." Drawing a line in the sand -- making a last stand against a clumsily defined enemy -- is not the way forward. We cannot wall ourselves in and shoot at the shadows. We must stand up as vulnerable, imperfect people and cross whatever lines are already drawn between us and the less fortunate, between ourselves and those whom some would call enemies. If we are to be an exceptional people, it must be because we are an accepting people -- a people with the humility to include our own normalcy in our identity, and to stand up anyway in the midst of difficulties and do what's right. ]]>The Religion of a Satirical Generationtag:www.huffingtonpost.com,2010:/theblog//3.7770972010-11-07T13:25:04-05:002011-05-25T18:10:25-04:00Kent Hayden, M.Div.http://www.huffingtonpost.com/kent-hayden-mdiv/great post on the Rally to Restore Sanity, Alexandra Petri described it as the Woodstock of the "I generation."
Millennials are Generation I, for whom life exists so we can put as many things as possible in quotes. And this "rally" is the closest millennials will ever get to a love-in. It's a "like-in."
I like this. I mean, officially. I "like" it on Facebook, where my "feelings" and "opinions" go to become real.
I was at the rally. And it was something hard to articulate. It was the right thing at the right time for a people who have never been offered the right thing at the right time. It was the first dose of Adderall to a generation with severe ADHD.
We gathered in costume carrying signs that read "legalize gay marijuana" and "God hates figs." We crammed into a crowd tight enough to give Mr. Rogers fits of misanthropic rage. And then we sang together and we laughed together and we got goosebumps together. It was an exercise in what philosopher Herbert Marcuse called the "irrational nature of our rationality."
And this, I think, is the point. We as a generation look around us and are horrified that no one else seems to notice how absurd everything is. Whether its Glen Beck's glasses or the Ragin' Cajin's head, or the inflammatory things that come out of them, we can't get on board with that, and our only recourse is apathetic snickering.
That is, until someone calls us together to inject a little conscious absurdity into the unconscious absurdity that usually dominates Washington. And then, our hunger for sincere discourse emerges in an almost literally ground-breaking swell of enthusiasm.
As a "master of divinity," my reflections on our generation's penchant for ironic apathy led me to thinking about our religious engagement -- our apathetic snickering in the back of the church. Is there hope for the same kind of movement in our religion as the Rally represented for our politics? Can the I Generation be incited to sing the Doxology with as much sincerity as we sang "America the Beautiful" with Tony Bennett on Saturday?
My first impulse is to say, obviously not. Religion is widely held to be the source of the ridiculous in our political discourse. It is with religion that conservative millennialists paint their apocalyptic caricatures of our future. It is with religion that even our more enlightened politicians pander to us to avoid making difficult ethical arguments. And it is in the name of religion that despotic autocrats justify their evil.
On the other side of the argument, religion is touted as an inescapable and wholesome reality from which our moral bedrock and communal identity have been formed. It is said to be that upon which our laws and constituting documents depend, and in whose purview those documents should remain. It is claimed as the primary source of order and decency in our society.
We are presented with the options "religion as the only good" or "religion as evil." But this dichotomy is false. It is a conflation of the good and bad aspects of human nature with the expression of that nature in a particular human activity. In fact, people do both great and terrible things in the name of religion, just as they do in the name of conservatism or liberalism, or in the name of love, or in the name of fear. Xenophobia and generosity do not belong to religion, they belong to humanity.
Stewart and Colbert exploded the absurd in our political discourse so that a satirical generation can take the future of our country seriously. It is unclear what exactly that will look like going forward, but in the moment, it felt like a quarter-million people smiling broadly in the October sun.
If we were to explode the absurd in religion, if we exposed the fallacy of our reductive handling of systems of understanding the deep questions of life, would the same kind of sincerity emerge from our irony?
If Generation I came to our houses of worship carrying satirical signs that read "God hates figs," and we laughed at clips of the simplistic and divisive rhetoric that makes us ashamed to call ourselves Christians, Muslims, Jews, Hindus, Sikhs, Buddhists, atheists or whatever, and if we sang familiar songs together and listened past the demonization of the other, what would happen? If we exposed all the things that make our religious discourse absurd -- all the squawking about other peoples' sins, all the fighting about which language to use to describe the ineffable, all the simple-minded conflation of poetry and prose, and the universalizing of the particular -- I suspect that there would be enough sincere goodwill floating in the wake of our laughter to give us goosebumps again, and to help us take seriously the future of our religious traditions.
]]>Reversing the Secularization of Eatingtag:www.huffingtonpost.com,2010:/theblog//3.7217912010-09-25T08:19:53-04:002011-05-25T17:40:20-04:00Kent Hayden, M.Div.http://www.huffingtonpost.com/kent-hayden-mdiv/
I imagine that such an association with eating is, or has been, the norm for most of us. Across cultures and traditions, the cycles of gathering, preparing, and consuming food have been occasions of ritual and storytelling. They have led to a series of practices and beliefs that ground people in their social, environmental, and existential contexts. But these connections are fading as our eating loses its grasp upon what sacred moments we have left.
Our ancestors indwelled a world flush with the sacrosanct. Hunters connected with their prey as a part of a single chain. They spoke to the spirit of the slain animal and respected its sacrifice. Farmers tended an order that both depended upon and sustained them. They danced and sang for the rain and acknowledged their place in the cycles of nature. Cooking was sanctified as communities grew and defined themselves in terms of their diets. Laws and rituals were developed to bind people together through food. And the final act of eating was sanctified as sustenance was passed between the work-rough hands that contributed to its production. Prayers were spoken and bread was broken as friends and families fed their living with a sense of gratitude.
As these relationships and connections began to be displaced by considerations of utility and efficiency, the sacred was squeezed out of our food system from the outside in. Scanning cartoon-faced packages and dropping cold-cuts into a basket is rarely occasioned with reflection upon one's place in the universe. The commodification of our eating eliminated the empathy between consumers and consumed. Chemically nurtured and internationally distributed monocropping robbed farmers of their connection with the rhythms
of the soil and their relationship with their customers. Mass-produced and nutritionally bankrupt diets broke the social ties of traditional cuisine. And the subjugation of meal-time to our commutes and our sitcoms eliminated the occasion for reflection upon and gratitude for the simple good of enjoying our food.
Our eating has been secularized. It has been robbed of its poetry and beaten into the staccato uniformity of packaged snacks. We have insisted upon efficiency as the only criterion of our culinary aesthetic. As a direct result, our prey suffer needlessly, our planet is wilting under the pressures of our demands, our neighbors are strangers, we are unhealthy, and our place in the order of things is lost behind the incessant pace of our living.
We are in desperate need of reconnecting our eating with the sacred. This needn't mean a return to the perspectives and practices of the past. It does necessarily mean a reevaluation of the fundamental principles by which we relate to our eating. It means including considerations of beauty and meaning in the design of our food systems.
Conveniently, our religious traditions are equipped with tools and traditions for just such a reconsideration. Ramadan, Yom Kippur, the Sabbath, and the Eucharist -- all opportunities for exploring and restoring connections between the sacred and our eating.
But to take advantage of this shared concern for sacred eating, we must be willing to crack open the shells that have formed around our rituals and allow them to inform our everyday living. They must be set loose on our reality so that our memories of warm cookies and coffee continue to bind together not only our own narratives, but our communities, our planet, and the thousand little relationships out of which the sacred emerges.]]>Connecting with the Sacred Through Fasting: Could It Solve the U.S. Food Crisis?tag:www.huffingtonpost.com,2010:/theblog//3.6949952010-08-31T20:26:40-04:002011-05-25T17:30:22-04:00Kent Hayden, M.Div.http://www.huffingtonpost.com/kent-hayden-mdiv/The living soil upon which we stand is disappearing as we mine it and line it with corn. The blue air through which we move is eating through our ozone layer as we feed our addictions to red meat and gasoline. The creeks in which we wade are tinted with the toxins of our technologies. And the very bodies with which we laugh and love are collapsing under the stress of our easy living.
But there are signs of resistance, bumps in the rolling inertia of the industrial machine. Small-scale farming movements are gaining momentum. Farmers' markets full of organic produce and pastured proteins are popping up in most cities. Awareness is spreading, and voices are being raised. People have awakened to the fact that convenience and homogeneity are not the criteria of a good lifestyle.
Last week I had lunch with a friend who is a long-term vegan. When she ordered her veggie burrito with no cheese or sour cream, I asked about the reasons for her abstinence. I personally avoid conventionally raised meat products and try to only eat pastured eggs, and I was interested in learning what led her to the more extreme position of veganism. As she described the reasons for her lifestyle, she spoke of the violations of animal rights and the environmental damage caused by the industrial food system. She confessed to loving cheese and how difficult and expensive it is to find a decent substitute. But she saw her boycott of the products which depend upon the use or abuse of animals as a way to have a practical impact upon those industries.
Before I could object that actually supporting those small farmers who did things ethically would have an equal and opposite positive impact upon the industry, a funny thing happened. As she lifted her forkful of beans and vegetables towards her mouth, a long string of cheddar stretched from her plate. The sneering exclamation at the sight of the very thing she had just been praising surprised me. She acted as though she had narrowly escaped a mouthful of poison.
The accidental consumption of that stray shred of cheddar would have had zero practical implications. She was not paying for it. She was not complicit in the questionable ethics of its production. It would not affect her health one iota. She had no logical reason to be repulsed. Her terror at the delicious string of cheese was based upon the logic of fairy tales; it was borne in a world in which a single bite from the forbidden fruit, a single stroke past the allotted hour, a single kiss from the destined mouth has the power to turn the world inside out.
Fasting is a non-rational abstinence. It is not the abstinence of the lactose intolerant, who forgoes milk because it will make her ill; it is the abstinence of the Hindu, who forgoes milk because it will damage his soul. This kind of thinking is illogical. It is imaginative. It is rare, and it is powerful. This kind of thinking is utterly absent from the reckoning of the industrial farming complex. The absence of non-rational empathic or narrative thinking is the mark of madness. It defines the neurophysiology of sociopaths, and it defines the cutthroat business ethics of our food system.
As my friend carefully scanned her burrito for any further sign of cheese, I realized that her veganism was a fast. Behind her reasons is a conviction that regardless of the logic of the issue, there is something sacred about her relationship to that cow which would be violated if she ate its cheese. We live in a secular society. This does not mean a world devoid of the sacred, but a world where the sacred is loose. It might emerge in any place, at any time. Ours is a world in which the destruction of the systemic, pathological idols which line our streets and fill our bellies might lead to the emergence of truth. We live in a world in desperate need of fasting.
I am not advocating veganism, vegetarianism, or any other ism. I am advocating a way of relating to the world. The solution to the hyper-rationalism and hyper-efficiency of our food system cannot be a competing rationalism. It must be a solution born of feeling. It must be fueled by the illogical conviction that the earth is sacred; that the way we interact with plants and animals who inhabit it, and the brothers and sisters with whom we share it, has a direct and unfathomable effect upon our souls. If our society is going to become a force for healing and for growth, it must be through the realization that the stories we are living transcend the rules that we impose upon them; that a tiny shred of cheese in a burrito might really make all the difference; that the recognition of the sacred in something simple, honest, and good might actually change the world.]]>The Case for Christian Agnosticismtag:www.huffingtonpost.com,2010:/theblog//3.6741702010-08-12T07:23:19-04:002011-05-25T17:15:21-04:00Kent Hayden, M.Div.http://www.huffingtonpost.com/kent-hayden-mdiv/
Unfortunately, this tendency to flee from ignorance is nowhere as common as it is in theology. Theological ignorance carries with it a tremendous vulnerability. Admitting it to oneself necessitates existential, moral, and relational openness. It demands the difficulty of dialogue. The obvious and safe defense against this vulnerability is feigned certainty. It is to nod as though we understand, and continue our monologues.
Jesus began his ministry with a call to metanoia, the Greek word commonly translated as "repentance" but which literally means change-thinking. To change one's thinking is to admit one's ignorance. It is to face one's vulnerability. But at some point along the way to modern theology, we bought into the idea that ignorance is a sign of weakness. The call to repent was replaced with a demand to consent and the honest questioning that is an integral part of metanoia came to be seen as a sign of bad faith. Agnosticism became conflated with indifference, or worse. And we became a society of gnostics.
Seven years ago, I began to study religion academically because I was certain that the Christian faith contained an exhaustive vocabulary for discussing the truth. But the more words I learned, the more highlighted the gaps between our language became. I wrote some brilliant papers (and some bad ones) which navigated the nuances of systematic theology. I constructed arguments with a rhetorical precision sufficient to rebut the most careful objections. I learned to read languages I've never heard spoken. I applied all my skill to filling out the gaps in my understanding. And the closest I ever came to answering the deep questions of life was when I sat in silence with an old man's suffering as he asked me why God had forsaken him. Under the desperate weight of his eyes, I knew that my answers were insufficient, so I read him the best non-answer I could find:
When it was noon, darkness came over the whole land until three in the afternoon. At three o'clock Jesus cried out with a loud voice, "Eloi, Eloi, lema sabachthani?" which means, "My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?" When some of the bystanders heard it, they said, "Listen, he is calling for Elijah." And someone ran, filled a sponge with sour wine, put it on a stick, and gave it to him to drink, saying, "Wait, let us see whether Elijah will come to take him down." Then Jesus gave a loud cry and breathed his last.
There is no poetry in the accumulation of answers. Poetry, and truth along with it, comes from an encounter with those corners of life which have not yet been filled with language. It comes from entering into our ignorance with the honest courage to question. It comes from a willingness to shake up the mental sediment in which we have hidden our secrets.
On the cross, Jesus was an agnostic. He was willing to face death with a why on his lips. Sometimes, in the comfort of a sunny afternoon, when much less is at stake, I have found the strength to entertain such questions myself. And when my belief is stirred by the gusts of doubt, and my knowledge is silhouetted against the beauty of mystery, I feel the uneasy presence of something beyond my capacity to speak, and I am grateful for all I don't know.
]]>Food and Faith: Agriculture as a Theological Acttag:www.huffingtonpost.com,2010:/theblog//3.6625292010-08-02T18:22:17-04:002011-05-25T17:10:24-04:00Kent Hayden, M.Div.http://www.huffingtonpost.com/kent-hayden-mdiv/eating is an agricultural act. I have always suspected that agriculture is a theological act. The way we produce and consume something as basic as our food not only determines our physical and environmental health but is a reflection of our social health and a contributing factor of our spiritual health. This is an idea that should disturb and excite us. If eating is agricultural and agriculture is theological, then right eating is a sign of faith, and unjust, aesthetically bankrupt eating endangers the soul.
I have suspected this connection since my grandfather washed his farm-calloused hands in holy water to baptize my infant head. My memories of the rattling of Grandpa's tractor are mixed with those of the booming of his preaching. I always imagined there was a link between the strength of his faith and the strength of his milker's grip. But for the first 25 years of my life, these loosely held notions remained in the background of my thinking and living. I was discontented with both the fast food and fast religion of our society. I gave up both, but was only rewarded with the occasional surge of self-righteousness as I passed by a burger joint hungry or turned off a radio sermon pessimistic. I knew that the easy food and easy religion that I had used to fuel my body and my soul for most of my life were bad for me. But I thought fasting was the only solution.
By the time I graduated from seminary, I was beginning to see signs of hope in our public discourse. People were talking about food and farming in meaningful ways. People were raising their voices in support of a religion that got its hands dirty. I came to possess the dangerous combination of optimism, conviction, and discontent that sometimes leads to an adventure. I was craving a meaningful way of life, which neither my years of consuming nor fasting had provided, and I suspected that the best place to look was in the very garden from which our food choices had excluded us long ago. I applied for an internship on a little organic farm in Washington state, packed up some clothes, a tent, and my dog, and hit the road.
For the past three weeks, I have been living, working, and eating with dirty hands. In those three weeks, I have showered a total of six times, blistered my hands five, watched 21 sunsets and 15 sunrises, lain under a garden sprinkler twice, floated down the Yakima river three times, and sunburned my neck too often to mention. I have been stopped short by beauty every day, and I have fallen asleep contented every night.
The spiritual abundance I have enjoyed while living with a sore back and blistered hands cannot be explained by the food I have eaten. I have eaten well before. It is not due to the awe I have experienced. I have been immersed in beauty before. It grows from the blisters and the aches themselves, earned in pursuit of a simple good thing. It is the result of reordering my understanding of "the good" to include struggling against and overcoming the benevolent afflictions of early mornings and long, hot days. The solution to the discontent of a fast food culture and a fast food religion is not just a rejection of the fruit of these societal trends. It is a total metanoia; a mind-turning towards a theological and culinary aesthetic that includes both difficulty and satisfaction as parts of the good. Our preachers must proclaim the complex mix of the painful and sublime that constitutes the true beauty of creation. Our faith communities must invite us into this beauty, by tearing down the white picket fences we have built between our self-referential good and evil. We must open up new fields for working and growing, and put ourselves to the difficult task of relationship building. Likewise, our food system must reclaim the value and dignity of hard work by connecting consumers to producers through community gardens, CSAs, and local, seasonal eating. We must demand that "fair trade" ceases to be a luxury, so that when we meet the men and women whose hands have given us our daily bread, we might look them in the eye and smile. We must relearn the bent-backed posture of farming, and with it, the bent-backed posture of prayer.
This will be difficult work, and it will be slow. Training our spiritual muscles to work and to harvest requires discipline. To relate to the beauty of the world on its own terms requires humility. The inertia of much of our living is against us. But behind us, urging us forward, is the steady strength of community; the strength of good living and good relationships; the strength of family, of earth, of home.
Our mistake was an old one. Our ancient ancestors warned us about the dangers of trying to polarize work and pleasure. Just like Adam and Eve, we have defined good and evil in terms of our own convenience, dividing that which has its being in unity. In our attempt to live in only that softer half of being that we have called good, we have denied ourselves the full experience; we have kicked ourselves out of the garden.
Luckily, the solution to our mistake is equally old and equally clear. Along with Adam and Eve, we have harmed the earth, and we have harmed ourselves. God's response remains the same:
In toil you will eat of (the ground)
All the days of your life.
Both thorns and thistles it shall grow for you;
And you will eat the plants of the field;
By the sweat of your face
You will eat bread,
Till you return to the ground,
Because from it you were taken;
For you are dust,
And to dust you shall return.
Such a life, such a struggle, such a blessing is ours. It is time we pick up our spades and claim it with a gratitude and an energy equal to the beauty of the gift.