Are you sure you want to be a Christian Nation?

This time of year, many of us will likely hear from our Christian pulpits pseudo-patriotic sermons about how important it is that we get back to being a Christian Nation, as we were when we were founded. Many of us have grown accustomed to hearing a similar statement from the prayers of those who open our services. Especially in this part of the country, where Christianity has oddly become connected to conservative politics, we have heard more and more often prayers that we will "return to the Christian principles upon which we were founded." I am always uncomfortable when I hear such prayers for many reasons. Furthermore, and this is what I will address here, anytime I hear this prayer, I wonder if the person speaking the prayer really understands what he is asking for. When he asks that we "return" to the Christian principles upon which we were founded, does he have a good understanding of what those principles were?

I suspect that he assumes that the Christianity of his founding fathers was similar to his own, and what he is asking for is that his particular understanding of Christianity would influence and in fact guide the policy of our government. But of course, it is usually not the case. Though it is indeed the case that our founding documents professed to be founded upon Christian principles (a claim worth critiquing in it's own right, though this is not the purpose here), what these principles were are not necessarily consistent with the modern Christian principles of many of the people I hear making these prayers. The fact is, the Christianity of our nation's founders looked quite a bit different than our own. Here, I am using these differences in order to challenge this contemporary desire to "restore" Christianity to our government, in order to question whether or not this really is what we want.

I wish to foreground this discussion by pointing out that, whether for right or wrong, our concepts of Christianity are intimately connected to our own cultural milieu. Here is an example. In our Sunday morning class, we are currently studying the letters of John. In his first letter, John seems to address a specific popular early heresy that held that Jesus could not have actually been human, but had been spirit all along. He, according to this teaching, only appeared to be human. In order to understand how such an heresy is possible, it is helpful to understand the cosmology of ancient Greek philosophy, which was dominant in the Hellenized first century Roman world. The Greek view divides existence into three planes. An Ideal plane exists in which the perfect version of everything lives. This plane is a bit of an abstraction, but think of it as heaven, where everything we know is present, but in its perfect form. There is then the physical plane, where we and everything we experience exists. Finally, there is artifice--things that humans make. These are copies of the physical world, which is itself a copy of the Ideal. The important thing to know here is that things degenerate as they move down the level of existence. Physical things are imperfect versions of the Ideal. Built things (art in particular, according to Plato) are the lowest form of existence, because these things are copies of copies. The heresy John addresses is made possible because, for people enmeshed in this cosmology, it is unthinkable that God (who exists in a perfect plane) could possibly be manifested in the physical (imperfect) realm. Since God is perfect, he cannot exist in imperfection, therefore, he could have only appeared to be physical.

The point here is to show that we extrinsically link our understandings of scripture with our understanding of the world. Most of the time, we do not even know that this is what we are doing. After explaining this concept in class, I drew parallels between this and Christian thought in the modern western world, which borrows much of our thinking from the Greeks. We still imagine a similar separation between a spiritual realm and a physical one--a spiritual existence and a physical one.  For this reason, we see our spirit and our physical bodies as being somehow distinct. We don't recognize, and most of the time we don't even know, that this view of things comes as much from Plato as it does from the Bible (much of the Old Testament defies such a separation of spirit and body, and sees the separation of the spirit from the body at death a decidedly bad thing [Ecc 9:10]), but we nevertheless infuse our interpretations of scripture with this way of viewing the world. This view of things influences, to some extent, our understanding of spiritual warfare, and baptism (which is either a necessary outward expression of an inward change or an unnecessary work), and is evident in phrases like "heart issue" (as if the heart can feel one way while the body behaves in another).

The purpose here is to show how our view of the way things work, views which often come from places other than the Bible, influences how we interpret the Bible and, thus, what it means to be a Christian. So now I intend to turn my attention to how our founding fathers saw the world, how that seems to have influenced their Christianity, and whether or not this type of Christianity is what we want to return to (By the way, it is in no way settled what it means to call the founders "Christian" at all. Some of them clearly were; some of them clearly were not. For most, such discussions rely on arguments of definition).

The drafters of our founding documents were incredibly educated (and fabulously wealthy) men, steeped in the European philosophies of Enlightenment. Just as the Platonic philosophies discussed above assumed a particular cosmology which influenced the early Christians' understanding of the gospel, so did the Enlightenment philosophies that influenced our founders. The Enlightenment view of created order is often explained as a Chain of Being (a concept that actually comes from the Middle Ages), in which created things exist in a chain from most complex to least. Things low on the chain were the least complex and least meaningful. Things high on the chain were the most complex, the most intelligent, and held the most agency--that is control over their own lives and destinies. Human beings, who are created in the image of God, are of course the highest thing in the physical realm of the chain of being. They are the pinnacle of creation, little gods in their own right, since they were, of course, created to rule over the earth. The have more agency, in other words, than anything except God himself.

This understanding of created order existing on a chain is and was metaphorical. The actual implication of this cosmology was that, to the thinking of educated men in the eighteenth century, things were very carefully created in order to function in a certain way. This philosophy assumes a value laden creation in which things work in an orderly fashion, unbroken by the "fallen" condition of man. The eighteenth century colonial view of God was a far cry from the one presented in Edwards's "Sinners in the Hands of an Angry God." The logical outcrop of such understanding is that God can be, and was, lasses faire in his involvement with creation. The optimistic eighteenth-century view of God was as a benign but mostly uninvolved creator. He certainly intervened in human affairs in important moments (and, of course, our Revolution would often be presented as just such a moment), but he mostly stayed out of the way. This is because he had created man to be innately logical. He was endowed with Reason (capital R). Man could, therefore, take care of himself. For political thinkers, social problems like crime and poverty were caused by intrusions from a corrupt and oppressive governments. A man stripped of his "God given" ability to take care of himself would naturally rebel in order to restore his proper position on the Chain, where God created him to be. If the government would just get out of the way, man would use Reason to deliver himself.

This thinking is all over our founding documents. Indeed, the founding documents of the United States are perhaps the pinnacle of Enlightenment philosophy in action. They are works of genius, to be sure. They are not, however, particularly sound pieces of Christian doctrine. The supposedly divine rights to "life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness" (likely a purposeful misquote of Locke's "life, liberty, and estate") are in no way guaranteed in the New Testament. In fact, the Declaration's assertion that it is a natural right of man to "alter and abolish" any government destructive to these natural rights and "to institute a new government" seems a remarkable departure from the teaching of Paul in Romans 13 that we are to "to be subject to governing authorities. For there is no authority except from God, and those that exist have been instituted from God." Jefferson was able to make such claims because his culture had, just as the hellenized church of the first century to whom John wrote, and just as we do today, inserted the philosophies of his own cultural context into his understanding of the nature of God. His ideas that these rights are natural, that authority comes from the people and not from God (as Paul claimed), and that it is a natural right to throw off a government comes as much from Locke, Hume, and Rousseau as it does from his reading of the New Testament. They hinge, once again, on an understanding of God as a distant creator, leaving mankind, who he has endowed with Reason, to his own devices.

While I'm actually kind of comfortable with the implications of this cosmology (though I don't think it's particularly correct), because it requires man to take responsibility for his own actions and control of his own destiny, I have often been under the impression that most of those I've heard asking God to return us to our founding principles would not be at all comfortable with such cosmology/theology. Instead, most of the people I hear repeating such prayers are from southern evangelical denominations who tend to believe in a God who is actively involved, not just in the large scale affairs of man through major but infrequent interventions (like the American Revolution), but in the day to day affairs of individual Christians. We (and by "we" I don't mean "me.") believe that we are called to certain professions, that there is a person chosen to be our spouse, that we can pray for God to open or close this or that door in order to guide our decisions. I happen to believe that reality splits the difference between these two extremes, and that God is intimately concerned with individuals and will, on occasion, intervene in our lives especially when we ask him to, but who is also content to be on an adventure with us. He gives me as much agency as he claims for himself. These three views of God are not the same and, in some ways, even compete, since living according to each may lead to very different behaviors.

So the question is, when we ask that God "return us to our Christian principles," which of these three competing Christianities are we asking for? If we are asking that we truly return to our Nation's founding principles, then we are asking for a view of God which posits him as a good, but distant sovereign who is content to let us live as we see fit. I don't think that this is what most of the people speaking this prayer have in mind. Instead, I suspect that they desire that God would intercede in the day to day operations of governments in order to guide our laws. This is absolutely not what our founders had in mind. Whenever one of us asks for a Christian Nation, I suspect that each of us is asking according to our own understanding of God and his proper relationship with the governance of a nation. And this is where such a prayer becomes problematic.

These different understandings of Christianity (which are, again, influenced by philosophy and cosmology), may not seem that different, but that is because they do not have the effect of civil law. What happens when we begin to base a system of law on one of them.  What happens to forms of Christianity that are not majority forms? That majority forms don't even consider Christianity. What happens when Methodists control government and outlaw the teaching of Baptism for the remission of sins? What happens to The LDS church when Baptists (who consider them a cult) take office? For that matter, what if we really did establish a "Christian" nation which, we should assume would mean that we based our laws on the teachings of Christ. Would we enshrine in law that citizens must sell all their possessions and give them to the poor? Would we, instead if imprisoning thieves, give them our coats instead? Although, for reasons not established here, this sounds pretty good to me, most of the people who speak such prayers would likely call this communism and say "the difference between Christianity and communism is that Christianity is a choice." But, of course, when Jesus spoke these things, he spoke them as commands. So which version of Christianity to we enshrine in our laws?

Such concerns are why our founders were genius enough to decree that "Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercising thereof," which is commonly understood as the separation of church and state. They understood that their understanding of the relationship between God and man (which, as we have seen, have little resemblance to the actual teachings of Christ, though it shares Christ's respect for individual people) is a great way to frame a nation, but not a particularly good way to run it.

Finally, I think it's completely appropriate that we pray for revival in our nation (and indeed in our world). I think we should pray that God will move in our communities, and that God will inspire and protect our leaders. Perhaps more importantly, we should not then stop at prayer, but we should go out and begin to produce change; we should do the work of revival. I think that, to a certain extent, our desire for a Christian Nation is a way to pass the buck. We make it the responsibility of the government to institute laws rather than taking on ourselves to teach a higher law. We desire prayer in schools while we fail to pray at home, and we wish for Bibles in schools while ours collect dust from Monday to Saturday. We want the ten commandments in front of our courthouses but not in our lives. We support political parties that protect the unborn but which also protect corporate greed, and when that party is installed, we somehow think that we have taken a step toward restoring our Christian roots.  So then, if we look around and we see that out culture is sick (it is) and dying (it is), it is not that our government has failed to retain its Christian roots; it is that we have. After all, our kingdom, which is not of this world, precedes and far exceeds the American Constitution.

I don't want pray for God to return our nation to its Christian roots, since they were never particularly Christian to start with. Instead, I pray that God will fully and firmly establish His own kingdom in his earth and that we His people will be his instruments.

The Joyful/Happy Dichotomy and Symantic Theology

In our Wednesday night Bible class, we are looking at a video series based on the Dallas Willard book The Divine Conspiracy. In the series, Willard is "interviewed" about his concepts by author and preacher John Ortberg. At one point in the conversation, Ortberg asks Willard about a statement in his book in which Willard describes looking at a beautiful beach in South Africa, realizing that God sees every beautiful thing in his creation at once, and suddenly feeling very happy for God. Ortberg points out that we don't often think about God as "happy," maybe joyful, but not happy. Willard replies by saying "what else would you expect joy to look like?" He goes on to suggest that perhaps joy and happiness aren't the same thing (a common modern Christian teaching) but that God is certainly happy with what he has made, even if there are parts of it (humans) that don't behave as he would like them to.

Of course, this opened the door for me to rant about how much I hate the teaching that "joy and happiness are not the same thing." We ran out of time and I didn't get to explain it (which I intend to do here), so I opened a can of worms that we didn't get to explore. I only got to explain that I can't stand this oft repeated Christian phraseology because it doesn't mean anything. These two words are in fact synonymous and our separation of "joy" and "happiness" into separate concepts is a semantic trick. Here's why I think so.

In popular Christianity, we have developed and taught the idea that joy and happiness are separate things. We base this on the [well grounded] assumption that "happiness" is an emotion and thus contingent upon circumstance. This is true, as far as I can tell. The issue, then, is what we do with the concept of joy. What is our working definition of this concept? The answer to the question "what is joy?" is always much more nebulous. It's apparently something more permanent, based on our relationship with God, and much deeper than fickle emotions. Thus, we can have "joy" even when we are not "happy." I am not at all satisfied with this definition. It's meaningless. And so, in my opinion, is a realistic distinction between these words. So where does such a distinction come from?

Our problem with equating "joy" with "happiness," and our subsequent desire to invent a distinction between the terms comes from our cognitive dissonance regarding versus like James 1:2. Here, James writes to the Jewish Christians scattered throughout the empire and tells them, "consider is pure joy, my brothers, whenever you face trials of many kinds, because you know the testing of your faith develops perseverance." Paul writes some similar things in his letters. We look at versus like this one, where we are being told to be joyful about trials, mistreatment, and suffering, and such commandments don't make sense to us. How could God expect us to be "happy" about suffering? So, rather than acknowledge that God asks us to do things which are hard, we invent this dichotomy. He tells us, not to be "happy," but to have "joy," and these are different things--even if we can't quite really describe how they're different.

In fact, this dichotomous understanding of these two concepts does not extend into any other context. That is to say, in none of our conversations, save for this topic alone, do we use these two words as if they are different things. When we refer to a joyous occasion, we are always talking about a happy occasion. We mean a wedding, not a funeral. When we think of "making a joyful noise," no one thinks about Barber's Adagio for Strings. Even scripture does not bear out this separation of concepts. John compares his feelings about the beginning of Jesus's ministry to a friend who is "full of joy when he hears the bridegroom's voice" (John 3.29). When the pregnant Mary enters Elizabeth's house, an unborn John "leaps for joy" (Luke 1.44). The Book of Acts describes Samaria as being full of "great joy" (8.8) at the healing of paralytics and cripples. All of these examples describe happiness. Such examples go on and on. So, even within the New Testament, happiness and joy are usually synonymous.

In fact, if we think about the people who we think of as being "filled with joy," we think of the people who always have a smile or encouraging word--in other words, people who appear to be happy, even when bad things are going on in their lives. So, happiness may not be joy, necessarily, but happiness is indeed the mark of joy.

The explanation for James's teaching, to me, is that indeed Christians can be happy, even in the midst of tribulation. Certainly, this seems unnatural and maybe even unfair. But remember that everything about Christianity asks us to behave differently than how the world would expect us to. But how can such a thing be possible? Emotions are natural reactions, and cannot therefore be inherently wrong. How can we be commanded to be "happy" about terrible things?

I think the answer, perhaps, lies in the person of Paul, a person who often talks about joy in hardship. In the Second Letter to the Corinthian church, Paul says to the church:

I have great confidence in you; I take great pride in you. I am greatly encouraged: in all our troubles, my joy knows no bounds. For when we came into Macedonia, this body of ours had no rest, but we were harassed at every turn--conflicts on the outside, fears within. But God, who comforts the downcast, comforted us by the coming of Titus, and not only by his coming but also by the comfort you had given him. He told us about your longing for me, your deep sorrow, your ardent concern for me, so that my joy was greater than ever. (2 Cor 7.4-7)

When Paul tells them that "in all our troubles, my joy knows no bounds," I do not think he intends to say that he is happy about his troubles, But I do think he intends to say that even during these troubles he remains happy. He is indeed referring to his emotional state. He goes on to explain how such a thing can be possible. Certainly, nothing about being harassed, being involved in conflicts, and being afraid makes one "happy." But, when the church at Corinth heard about this problems, their love for him spurred them into action. First they loved Titus. Then they sent Titus with ovations of love for Paul. Paul learned that they hurt for him, longed for him, loved him. And their expressions of love made his "joy greater than ever." I do believe that when Paul refers to "joy" here, he is expressing a feeling of happiness--the emotional stuff that's supposed to be separate and different than "joy." See, the trials themselves did not make Paul happy, but in the midst of these trials, Paul found something to be happy about.

The reason we as Christian should be able to find happiness even during struggles is that we are to see the world in fundamentally different ways than does the world. So we can indeed be "happy" when James tells us to be joyful of our trials. Because these trials means that God is planning to use us for something. And that's pretty cool--something to be actually emotionally moved by. Something to be happy about. And the love that our brothers and sisters show for us in our struggles is something to be happy about. Certainly, responding to trials with happiness is unnatural. Such responses take training. And I don't think this training comes from giving ourselves permission to be unhappy even while giving ourselves credit for being joyful. Instead, such training comes through intentionally looking at our trials and searching for what God is doing through them.

Inasmuch as we often use the word "joy" to mean something more like "peace" when we espouse the teaching I'm critiquing here, I am comfortable in saying that there may indeed be a slight difference in these concepts of "happiness" and "joy." When I say that I hate this teaching and that I think it's nonsense, I am admittedly being a bit hyperbolical. But it is true, and vitally important to understand, that if these are different things, than one is necessarily the fruit of the other. Those who possess joy will be happy, and they will often show happiness when the world would not expect them to, when they would in fact have permission to be unhappy. So, if joy and happiness are different, they nevertheless belong together.

This Thanksgiving, Are We Celebrating Cooperation or Genocide

Anyone at least my age remembers participating in Thanksgiving Day pageants in elementary school. In these pageants, some of us would dress like pilgrims, some like Indians (always an inaccurate term, now a distasteful one too), and some would even dress as turkeys. We would sing songs and perform little skits which all designed reinforce the American mythos of a cooperative relationship between Native Americans and early settlers of the "New World." Though the holiday (which was made an official by Abraham Lincoln, undoubtedly for political purposes) had been intended to celebrate the cooperation between the Plymouth Colony and the Wapanoag tribe, the holiday was often connected to Christopher Columbus who we were always taught had "discovered" the New World. In fact, in Canada, Thanksgiving is celebrated on the same day the U.S. celebrated Columbus Day.

Of course, this myth has come under fire in the past couple decades as well meaning folks have asked whether or not we ought to be celebrating the fact that an imperialist European force crossed an ocean and subdued a continent full of people. For this reason, I was surprised to see my sons come home from day care the other day with construction paper headdresses rather like the ones I remember making for our Thanksgiving pageants. Of course, I also noticed that the headdresses were altered from those that I remember, as if they were hiding what they were. Instead of cutouts of feathers, the headdresses were adorned with cutouts of hand prints in yellow, green, and blue. They combined feathers with our old technique of drawing turkeys.

These, along with the general spirit of the season got me thinking. How should well meaning people view Thanksgiving? How should we view our early history as a nation? Were we heroes in search of religious freedom, or wicked imperialists bent to grabbing as much land as we could, at the expense of those who already lived here? Is either of these views accurate or fair?

Certainly, the myths of my childhood are inadequate. It will not do for me to celebrate Columbus (since we have connected these events in our perception of cultural history) for discovering a "New World." How can this be when millions of people already lived here. To do so requires that we take a decidedly Euro-centric view of history. Only Europeans matter, and only their exploits are worthy of history.

But might the other extreme be lacking as well? Should I refuse to celebrate the crimes against humanity perpetrated by those Imperialist Europeans from whom I descended and who are ultimately responsible for my being here? I would argue that this view also involves assumptions that are both Euro-centric and inaccurate.

This view, in most of its forms, seems to assume a benevolent population of Native Americans who were bewildered by a European understanding of land ownership and who were ultimately overcome by superior force. This view positions European settlers as pirates (Vonnegut used this term explicitly) but it also seems to position Native Americans as romantically naive, almost childish people who lived off the land, to which they believed they belonged.

This view is every bit as racist as the first. It ignores the richly complex sociopolitical milieu of the Native American tribes living on the east coast in the seventeenth century. It ignores the complex relationship and the history of the relationship between early settlers and Native Americans, particularly the Wapanoags, the tribe if the "first" Thanksgiving.

A well nuanced explanation of the history of early settlers and their relationship to those people already living in the Massachusetts Bay area can be found in Nathaniel Philbrick's Mayflower. His book provides wonderful historical insight as to how the events we talk about at Thanksgiving actually occurred, who the people involved were, and what their relationship was like. Through this book, we gain a better sense of what we ought to regret, and what we ought to celebrate.

The first generations of settlers at Plymouth and Massachusetts Bay were far from being conquistadors looking for cities of gold. Instead, they were half-inept sailors sick and weary from a long voyage. They might have resembled illegal immigrants who have just crossed the Arizona desert more than a well armed force of confident Europeans. For their part, the Native Americans living in New England were certainly not romantic nomads quietly living off the land. Instead, they were farmers in permanent settlements. They lived on close proximity to other tribes and were thus politically savvy, engaging in land disputes and forging treaties, much like those is crowded Europe.

When colonists first arrived on Massachusetts Bay, they were hardly conquerors ready to subdue a bunch of disorganized natives. In fact, it seems likely that, had the Wapanoags wanted to, they could have pushed the settlers back into the sea. When fighting did begin to break out, it was localized. The first (and most important) major conflict came with King Philip's war, decades after the settling of Plymouth. Philbrick describes the ultimate cause of the war in this way:

By the midpoint of the seventeenth century. . .the attitudes of of many of the Indians and English had begun to change [from that of a spirit of cooperation and cohabitation]. . .Both sides had begun to envision a future that did not include the other.

This first war was much more evenly matched that one might assume. By this point, Native Americans had been able to acquire the same weapons as the settlers, and King Philip (the English name adopted by Metacomet, sachem of the Pokanokets) was well educated and often dressed in expensive clothing he bought in Boston. On the other side, one of the chief agitators (perhaps accidentally) of the war was a Harvard educated Native American Christian named John Sassamon.

The point is, The breakdown of diplomacy between early settlers and Native Americans was hardly a one sided affair, and it is hardly accurate to think of early settlers as marauding invaders sacking the villages of unsuspecting natives. Instead, two groups who had one lived in cooperation had begun to want to push the other out. So, with a more nuanced view of how things really were, how are we to think about and celebrate Thanksgiving?

Without a doubt, the policies of the young United States toward Native Americans was deplorable. The evils of the White Man's Burden, western expansion, and so on should not be minimized, and certainly should not be celebrated. And it may be impossible to separate entirely these travesties from our early history as settlers. But the spirit of cooperation between Native Americans and settlers which allowed Plymouth to survive can and should be remembered and celebrated. As Philbrick points out:

For a nation that that has come to recognize that one of its greatest strengths is its diversity, the first fifty years of Plymouth Colony stand as a model of what America might have been from the very beginning.

Without a doubt, much of the history that follows these first years is tragic and shameful. As greed and hatred are common to all mankind, tragedy and shame mar all of human history, not just that of this country. But this first generation of settlers shared with us the dream of a cooperative utopia, and though they were sick and poor, that dream was very nearly realized because two groups who did not know each other, could not speak the same language, and had no reason to trust one another nevertheless shared with one another. Thanksgiving, then, may and should still be celebrated as a picture of what could have been--a picture of what still may be.

Bin Laden's Death and the Discursive Use of Scripture in Social Media

One of the interesting things about being both a Christian and an academic, particularly one whose interests lie in digital rhetoric, is getting to watch the interesting discursive practices of lay Christians as they navigate life. For this reason, the conversations in response to the death of Osama Bin Laden have been particularly interesting to me. So, here, in the midst of the moment, I'm dropping in to make some notes about this rhetorical event even as it unfolds.

Because social media sites allow such instantaneous, unreflective, and unrevised communication, it's a prime site for watching the ways in which people react to and discuss events, like the death of our current greatest enemy. For this reason, I've been watching facebook posts from my Christian (and a few former-Christian) friends.

I've seen three different threads running my friend's facebook posts. They are:

1) God does not delight in death, even of evil men, so celebrating Bin Laden's death is inappropriate (Ez 18:23, for example).

2) In this, I'm including variations on one theme: God is just and therefore it is right that the evil should die, and the emotions attached to retributive justice are human and natural and therefore cannot be judged (Psalm 137:8-9)

3) People shouldn't be using the scripture to make these arguments, since we must, by definition, argue these scriptures out of context.

I'll address the first two by critiquing the third. The view that we should not be using scripture to back our thinking on this issue seems to rely on a couple of assumptions. First, that the authors of the status updates falling into the first two categories intend to use scripture as evidence that their view point is the correct view. And, second, that they shouldn't do so.

This first assumption may very well be correct. Certainly, I've been watching a lot of arguments and implications that the author sees his or her view as the correct one and that others must get on board. The authors of the first category seem to be the bigger offenders in this regard. Some (by no means all, and probably not even most) of these authors wish to prove that those who rejoice in Bin Laden's death do not show the love of Jesus, and that rejoicing over death, even of a man as evil as Bin Laden, is therefore sinful. Implicit in such arguments is the suggestion that because I do have this kind of love, my Christianity is superior to your's. Certainly, I understand the critique of this type of argument. Such presentations of Christian thought make us look narrow, and completely out of touch with human experience/emotion.

Authors of the second category often seem instantly defensive, expecting or responding to the arguments of the first category. I can likewise understand the objection to this category. Such presentations of ourselves may make us seem unrepentant, showing a lack of understanding for how bad people become bad, and perhaps downright hypocritical (I'm supposed to love my enemies after all).

So I understand the objections to people using scripture to justify their own feelings on what is an extremely important national event. But I do not share it. This is because I question assumption number two.

One colleague of mine noted that this is evidence of why people ought not use the Bible as evidence in an argument. She says this from the perspective of a composition teacher in the Bible belt, where we are constantly trying to convince our students that there are very few academic arguments that benefit from citing scripture. That's just not the way academic writing works.

Indeed, the Bible is not written in such a way that it can work for arguments of scientific (social or natural) proof. Instead, the Bible is about the stuff of life. This is why I critique authors in category three. Writers in this category understand that the the Bible cannot be used to decide which side is right and thus they argue that it should not be.

I, however, think that this is exactly what scripture is for. Scripture is not helpful in arguing objective truth; it is, however, designed to help us navigate the subjective experience of human life.

The reason writers in both categories are able to find scripture that seems to back up their own feelings is because the Bible does in fact support both views. Jesus was the prince of peace, but he also came to bring division. As one friend of mine wrote "The Bible says not to get drunk. It also says God makes wine to make the heart glad. The Bible says God hates divorce and also says God divorced Israel. Go Figure." The Bible contains such contradictions (and they are contradictions) because life itself is contradictory. The Bible is complex because people are complex.

The purpose of these scriptures, then, is to help us make sense of and discuss the often contradictory emotions we experience in these events. My colleague mentioned to me that half the posts she saw used the Bible to support the idea that we should rejoice and the other half were used to support the idea that we shouldn't. My response was that this is because both were correct.

This is why I applaud the open conversations taking place on this issue. By discussing these events, and by struggling with our experiences and with how scripture relates to them, we gain a picture of the complexity of life and the complexity of God. Some in category three have expressed that these types of public debates are dangerous because they make Christians seem divided. But I have often though that the church's role in a post-modern culture ought to be to show the world that we too are complex and disintegrated subjects. That we too struggle with how we ought to feel and act. That there is room for other people to struggle with us.

We ought to embrace our own multiplicities and wrestle with them. In this way we, like Jacob, wrestle with God.

Why You Never Research a Preacher's Story

As the son-in-law of a career preacher, and a regular church attendee, and as someone who teaches research, I know that preacher's stories aren't all they're cracked up to be. In fact, anyone who's spent any time in church knows that preachers' stories are illustrative fish tales. As literary texts, they belong structurally to the genre of myth. I don't mean "myth" in the popular sense of meaning "false." I mean that as narrative constructs, preacher tales work in the same way as other mythical works such as old parables, nursery rhymes, and (dare I say) the Bible. Myths are texts use common archetypal tropes in order to teach the hearer and they put their emphasis, not necessarily on the historical and chronological accuracy of the story, but on the message. In other words, myths privilege truth over facts.

So, having foregrounded this post with that, I should say that I don't particularly expect preachers' tales to pass the muster of rigorous research. Nevertheless, when I tried to find a quote from a preacher's story I recently heard (because I wanted to use it on facebook), I got a first hand look at just how shifty and shaky the literary form of the sermon illustration is. So today, just for fun, I will present to you a dubious sermon illustration followed by my own research and finally a bit of speculative questioning as to how a story (actually, more correctly, stories as we shall see) goes from half true anecdote to sermon illustration.

First, the story itself, from the best of my memory, as I heard it from the pulpit:

Harmon Killebrew, the baseball great, once told a story from his childhood about his father. Harmon was the youngest of four brothers, and his father used to play catch with his boys in the front yard. One day, a neighbor, who was known for his well-manicured lawns walked by and said to Harmon's father, "You'll never grow any grass if you keep playing on it like that." Harmon's father looked at the man and replied, "I'm not trying to grow grass; I'm trying to grow boys."

Here is the actual quote from Killebrew (which is quoted to death all over the inter-webz):

My father used to play with my brother and me in the yard. Mother would come out and say, "You're tearing up the grass." "We're not raising grass," Dad would reply. "We're raising boys."

The best context I can find for Killebrew's quote, without doing the kind of serious actual research for which I may have to log into EBSCO, is from a 2004 interview in with Killebrew in Baseball Digest in which he says:

"Dad used to work with my brother and me on different things that were important in all sports--football, basketball, baseball. One evening we were out in the front yard, and my mother came out on the porch and said to my father, "Clay, the boys are digging holes in the yard, tearing up the grass." And my father went over to my mother and very sternly said: "Kate, we're not raising grass here. We're raising boys."

Though it doesn't particularly diminish the quality of the quote, the elements of the preacher's story are markedly different. Where is the idyllic scene of playing catch in the yard? Where is the turf-vain neighbor who acts as something of a villain, and who we can imagine flaunts his "Yard of the Month" sign and yells at neighbor kids who stray into his grass? Can this story have gone this wrong?

First of all, yes, of course it could. If one has ever played the game in which several people sit in a circle passing a message around to see how much it changes before it gets back to the message's originator, than one can understand how these tales get so out of control. One preacher hears a story in a father's day sermon and decides he likes it. The next year, when preparing his own father's day sermon, he says to himself, "self, we sure did like that story we heard last year. Now what was it again?" and he does the best he can from his memory of a sermon he half listened to a year before. The youth-intern from the nearby Christian college hears his sermon and sacks it away for a few years later when he'll be the pulpit minister for the kind small congregation that hires brand new grads. And so on the story goes.

Of course, with this story, there is something else, an element of the story which lets Reverend Preacher off the hook a little. And that is this fact: this story is not original (or at least not singular) with Killebrew. Instead, there is another version of this story that involves college football great Amos Alonzo Stagg.

In 1965, just before Stagg's death, the football coaching great and champion of the cause of amateur sports had a bunch of kids playing football on his front lawn. A neighbor told Stagg that if he allowed the kids to play "the grass with never grow that way." Stagg replied, "I'm not trying to grow grass. I'm trying to grow kids."

So Stagg's story fills in the missing elements from the Killebrew story. In Stagg's story, we see the neighbor presented as a character instead of the father's own wife being used as the foil, and the quote is a bit more direct (substitute "boys" for "kids" and it's exact.) What I can't yet be sure if is what these stories have to do with one another. Did the preacher's story grow out of an accidental combination of the two, as if one of the preachers in the archetypal chain heard both stories and confused them? Did in fact one of these men (Staggs and Killebrew) steal the saying from the other? Reportedly, Staggs made his remark shortly before his death in 1965, by which time Harmon Sr. had been dead for twelve years. But I don't know when Killebrew started telling his version of the story. So did Staggs borrow from Killebrew's language when he made his remark to his neighbor, or did Killebrew borrow from Stagg's language when he began telling his own childhood story about his father sternly replying to his mother's concern about the yard? Or did in fact both men make remarkably similar statements, allowing for later preacher story confusion? I can't say for certain, as it is 0034 hrs and I'm tired of researching something that will be of no use to me in my dissertation. More on this controversy as I get bored enough to pick the research back up.

Thoughts on State Sponsored Death and Old Testament Law

Anyone who knows my politics knows of my ambivalence toward the death penalty. On one hand, I do not doubt the justice of it. If a man kills another, it is fitting that he should be killed. One need only look back to the Noahic Covenant: "Whoever sheds man's blood, by man shall his blood me shed" (Gen 9.6) (of course, I'm not sure that this verse is a command for the state to kill murderers so much as it is a karmic statement like "live by the sword, die by the sword"). Also, as a man who has been face to face with horrific personal tragedy caused by another's crime, I feel a deep longing for justice. When I here about the nine year old child who had been killed in a drive-by, or I talk to the woman who has been raped, or see the body of a brutally murdered man whose only crime was to become addicted, I cry out for something to be done. There are some crimes for which only death can atone.

So it is not the justice of the death penalty that I question. Rather, it is the state's competence in deciding who should live and die. When people bring up the jurisprudence of the Bible as support for a state sponsored death penalty, I am quick to remind them that the Old Testament nation of Israel was a theocracy. Therefore, at least within the narrative context of the Bible, God himself was the appeals process. It was God who ultimately decided who lived and who died. From a historical perspective, it may be optimistic to say that God's oversight prevented the killing of the falsely accused, but it's not out of the question to say that this would be the Bible's perspective. In our own imperfect and secular legal system, on the other hand, we can make no claim to the ultimate oversight of God himself (although some probably would).

When one looks at our system, one must consider the examples of Willie Francis, whose story is told by Gilbert King in his book, The Execution of Willie Francis. Willie was a seventeen year old African-American sentenced to death for the murder of a Louisiana pharmacist. He was convicted on evidence so lousy that, today, he would not have even been charged. He was sent to the electric chair twice when the intoxicated jail trustee entrusted to electrocute him the first time botched the wiring, sending Willie enough electricity to torture him, but not to kill him. One must consider the cases of Ron Williamson and Dennis Fritz who were sentenced to death and to life in prison respectively for a murder they did not commit and who spent thirteen years in prison until DNA evidence exonerated them. Consider the men sent to death row on the false testimony of Joyce Gilchrist whose testimony helped lead to the execution of eleven men (we may never know if some of these were innocent), and who was willing to trade men's lives for her own career ambitions.

I don't use these examples to say that our criminal justice system is irreversibly corrupt. Indeed, I don't believe that such is the case. By and large, our system is dominated by men and women who are trying to do the right thing, and I truly believe that our system gets it right almost every time. But the cost of failure is so high. Get it wrong, even once, and you've killed an innocent person. And killing an innocent person makes you a murderer. And so, while I long for the justice that seems to come with the death penalty, I find that I can't quite support it either. And this is the view that for a couple of years I have stuck with.

Then, a few days ago, I listened to stories about serial rapists and listened to a few interrogations in which these men talked about their crimes. Many of these men spoke flippantly about actions that had forever changed the lives of their victims. Some of them masturbated while speaking to detectives or even while listening to their victims' testimony in open court. It is easy to see the unmitigated evil in the hearts of these men.

This got me thinking about the reasons the Old Testament supported the killing of their worst criminals. Proponents of our death penalty will often argue one or all of the following points: 1) putting these criminals to death insures that they will never hurt another innocent person, 2) putting criminals to death sends a message to other would-be criminals that they too will be killed if they commit these crimes and 3) putting criminals to death saves on the cost of feeding and sheltering these criminals for life. Each of these arguments is easily defeated. Argument 1 is easily countered by saying, "so does putting them in prison for life," (and retort usually countered with argument 3). Argument 2, a logical anecdotal argument, seems to be invalidated by crime stats. Though we are the only developed Western nation that still has a death penalty, we are also the nation among these with the highest rates of violent crime. The fear of death seems to have done little to stem violent crime in our country. Thus, the commission of these crimes seems to have little, if any, correlation to the severity of punishment possible. Finally, argument 3 is just flat false. It costs more money to put a criminal to death than it does to feed them for life because of the expense of the appeals process. Even a wealthy defendant will become indigent after his first trial. This is because, in most cases, whatever he does not spend on his defense, will be seized for victim's compensation funds. Thus, his appeals will all be tax-payer funded. It could be (and often is) argued here that the appeals process could be expedited so that is is less expensive, but the types of injustices that I have already pointed out show the danger in that; If Dennis Fritz's appeals process had been expedited, he would have been executed.

Interestingly, you see no arguments like these in the Old Testament Law. I think this is explained by the differences in the way we see crime and punishment. Modern Americans see the law from a very individual perspective; what needs to happen to this individual for this crime. Hebrews, on the other hand, thought of crime and punishment as communal acts how does this person's crimes relate to us as a people. I don't mean this in the same sense as when we ask, "what is the danger to the public if we allow this person to remain at large." But rather, I think their question may have been, "what have we, as a people, done through this person." Hebrews saw a type of connectivity between people and other people and indeed through people and creation that we do not. Thus, scripture explains its use of the death penalty thus, "If anyone kills a person, the murderer shall be put to death at the evidence of witnesses. . .So you shall not pollute the land in which you are" (Num 36.30-33). As anyone who is even a little familiar with the Bible knows, there are many other offenses in the OT for which one should either be put to death or expelled from the country. Interestingly, in all these statutes, the idea of punishment is never really about stopping the crime from occurring again, sending an example to the people, or even about punishment at all. Instead, the OT is obsessed with cleansing the land (and the people) of evil. The Hebrew people killed their offenders, not because they deserved it (though they may have), but because they believed that the evil in one person remained in the community as a whole. I don't mean to say that they knew that if they allowed an evil person to remain that the person would continue to do evil to others and thus he had to be stopped. Rather, because the evil person belonged to our community, so did the evil within him. And the people of God simply cannot abide evil.

These thoughts do not necessarily change my mind about our death penalty today. After all, God no longer exists within a particular state as he did with Israel, but among a people, not defined by an earthly government. So I don't see OT Law as jurisprudence for our own secular law. Instead, these thoughts make me wonder how we, as a people, are effected by the presence of evil among us. Does the evil within one of the rapists I listened to the other day remain, at least in part, within me as well? Does it pollute not just our society but indeed creation as a whole that we abide evil? And if so, what do we, as a people, do about it?